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Former Pentagon Analyst: China Has Backdoors To 80% of Telecoms
An anonymous reader writes "A former Pentagon analyst reports the Chinese government has 'pervasive access' to about 80 percent of the world's communications, and it is looking currently to nail down the remaining 20 percent. Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE Corporation are reportedly to blame for the industrial espionage. 'Not only do Huawei and ZTE power telecom infrastructure all around the world, but they're still growing. The two firms are the main beneficiaries for telecommunication projects taking place in Malaysia with DiGi, Globe in the Philippines, Megafon in Russia, Etisalat in the United Arab Emirates, America Movil in a number of countries, Tele Norte in Brazil, and Reliance in India.'"
Never fight a LAN war in Asia.
Emphasis added on the word potential. Now where's the proof (preferably from a chip teardown by a reputable hardware hacker or hacking group)?
Actually they DID say why: specifically it boiled down to "because we cannot be *absolutely certain* that the Chinese Government does not have such a close relationship with Huawei that deploying their equipment would not (ever) compromise our national security".
Seems to me that someone in The Australian Government has learned a few important life lessons from The X-Files. (ie trust No-One).
Either that (a) or (b) they're just playing The Obvious "Devil You Know / Devil You Don't" card; and/or decisions were influenced by vendor-$ and Huawei could-not/would-not/weren't-given-a-chance-to cough up enough.
Personally Option (b) sounds more typical of government.
I for one will be eternally surprised to see any government making a well researched, informed, well reasoned decision - they're almost always a pack of retarded monkeys interested in looking after themselves and their friends.
Go On Mr Government - PROVE ME WRONG - I Dares Ya!
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Emphasis added on the word potential. Now where's the proof (preferably from a chip teardown by a reputable hardware hacker or hacking group)?
There won't be any. Anyone with the capability of analyzing and reverse-engineering thousands of ICs would need deep pockets -- Either a large corporation or a government. A hacking group won't have the resources, even a well-funded one. You're talking about several hundred highly trained engineers from a dozen different disciplines working for years on the project, with no return on investment. There's no reason for a large corporation to conduct such business domestically -- they already have comparable products, and the Chinese equipment doesn't have any capabilities that aren't commonly available elsewhere. That leaves governments with a GDP in excess of a hundred billion USD per year. Short list. Said governments wouldn't disclose the results of such a search either, as it's a legitimate intelligence asset that would need to remain classified -- you don't want your enemy to know what you know, especially not before you come up with a way to defend against the attack or co-opt the infrastructure for your own purposes.
Second, forensically analyzing tens of thousands of chips and microprocessors would be pointless anyway: There still has to be some method of communicating the information back, and they can't compromise the entire communications chain, which is what would be required. Telecommunications equipment is designed to be evesdropping-friendly; Complete with port mirroring, trace and audit logs, selective forwarding based on rules... it's all standard. We're not even talking about the law enforcement black boxes, this is just stuff used for legitimate business purposes. The moment any such 'bug' went active, it would set off alarms -- by necessity, the communications would have to occur over the provider's own network. Unless their network admins are idiots they should notice the abberant traffic.
China would have to be very stupid to leverage such an intelligence asset for peanuts; It's basically a one-shot, and it would cost them billions in telecommunications contracts domestically. So if they do have such a capability, they're not going to use it until the value of the intelligence they would gain from it equals or exceeds that amount.
So there's two arguments right there based just on the economics of the situation. I strongly suspect that this unnamed pentagon analyst is being paid to spread disinformation. Such disinformation would serve the purpose of keeping the american public sucking the tit of the Department of Homeland Security's fear juice, and exaggerating our actual intelligence capabilities -- rather than waste hundreds of millions on a reverse engineering project that could never be made public, we'll just insinuate that "We know. We're on to you," and rattle our sabre a little. Maybe it deters them, maybe it forces them to expend resources to find out whether we're telling the truth or not, but it costs us nothing to make such a statement.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This "former pentagon analyst" is a writer for WND, a rightwing web news site with all the credibility of the National Enquirer.
Not to say that China wouldn't build backdoors into telco gear, of course they would. The US requires telcos to provide access for it to spy on calls, it wouldn't particularly surprise me if the Chinese just built it in without talking publicly about it. After WWII, many countries purchased Swiss encryption gear, and many years later it was divulged that the US had inserted a backdoor into that gear. Why would China, or telco gear, be any different?
The fact is, around the world everyone should assume that anything done over a telephone is shared with unknown parties. Unless they've got trustworthy gear to encrypt calls end-to-end.
Article read like FUD.
As a consequence, sources say that any information traversing "any" Huawei equipped network isn't safe unless it has military encryption.
Wow, military grade encryption? Would that be, like, AES, one of the most widely deployed, tested, and recognized encryption schemes out there? Wow man, that stuff is hard to come by.
I also like the implication that unless you have a VPN, it will still magically find its way out to Huawei regardless of what other network controls you have in place. Having backdoors is one thing, getting thru a firewall is something completely different.
Sources add that most corporate telecommunications networks use "pretty light encryption" on their virtual private networks, or VPNs.
Proprietary information could be not only spied upon but also could be altered and in some cases could be sabotaged.
Someone want to explain to me the difference between "altered in transit" and "sabotaged"?
Im sorry, when so many of the assertions in the article read like uninformed drivel, its kind of hard to take the headline seriously. I have a strong feeling that the person who wrote this doesnt understand any of the terms hes going on about.
So you buy Cisco and are subject to US backdoors.
Exactly. More DHS scaremongering in yet another lame attempt to justify their existence. Started nine years ago it is now one of the largest departments in the entire federal government with 260,000 employees. Under the guise of combating "terrorism" - a very broad term that can mean whatever they want it to - and bolstered by the Patriot Act, this agency violates the rights of American citizens on a daily basis. And just like every other federal agency, it's never going away. It will only get larger.
No, THEY have. We keep getting the stuff they make, and they get US dollars.
They don't always get dollars - due to the trade imbalance, they get IOUs. Our debt to China increases every year, and China can't cash in on it, because that would crash our economy completely, and they would get even less.
We're like an old exiled royal who lives on debt - nobody dares to call him out on being insolvent and having a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting to his former riches, because that would make the chits and IOUs people hold (much of it from when he was solvent) worthless. So everyone continues to lend him money to keep the pretence of solvency and prevent him from defaulting, yet will quietly sell off the debt to new players if given a chance.
Pervasive espionage.
Chinese step up computer espionage against United States
FBI estimates there are currently more than 3,000 corporations operating in the United States that have ties to the PRC and its government technology collection program.
Chinese telecom firm tied to spy ministry
I'm sure you can figure out why this might be important. . . well, maybe not.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Strange Loops: Ken Thompson and the Self-referencing C Compiler
Reflections on Trusting Trust - Ken Thompson
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell