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US Nuclear Lab Removes Chinese Tech
Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters reports that Los Almos National Laboratory has removed switches produced by Chinese firm H3C, which once had ties to Huawei. This appears to be a step taken to placate a nervous Congress, rather in response to any detected security issues. From the article: 'Switches are used to manage data traffic on computer networks. The exact number of Chinese-made switches installed at Los Alamos, how or when they were acquired, and whether they were placed in sensitive systems or pose any security risks, remains unclear. The laboratory - where the first atomic bomb was designed - is responsible for maintaining America's arsenal of nuclear weapons.
A spokesman for the Los Alamos lab referred inquiries to the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, which declined to comment.'"
If they don't want made-in-China equipment, what are the alternatives? I don't think that doing without is much of an option.
Good thing they took them out before they were connected to anything...
Most HP A-Series switches are just rebadged H3C hardware. Some still come direct from HP with the H3C badge on.
Given that the A-Series firmware is present across even the HP badged hardware, are they going to throw out all HP A-Series switches?
We have the know-how, and a patriotic, knowledgeable, and capable workforce. If congress instituted taxes on foreign made goods to help fund jobs in America, we'd be safer.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
They will most likely be replaced with equipment provided by vendors who are on the U.S. military's "Trusted Foundry" schedule. It doesn't matter if half the chips in those "Trusted Foundry" switches are manufactured in China - as a result of careful research, you can be "reasonably" sure they don't contain backdoors or malicious code.
"Reasonably."
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
wtf is this some lab like los alamos?
Shame on the government for letting foreign technologies be present in the first place. Did we learn nothing from Siberian Pipeline Sabotage ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage). Hmm.. Nuclear research....important? hmmm....
A nuclear lab is, as I would imagine, a place where radioactive materials are researched in order to produce destructive levels of energy. Information generated, processed and researched in this lab should be ideally completely cut off from the rest of the World. It makes zero sense to connect this network of computing devices to the outside world and the internet, so that researchers can post to Facebook or play networked Solitaire. Security should be achieved by completely isolating this network from the rest of the World.
I do not know of any 'networking' devices from any country or vendor that does not have any vulnerabilities, or is completely immune to hacking. To imagine that non-Chinese networking devices are more 'secure' is to totally miss the point.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
In your 2nd part, you seem to imply that exploiting weaknesses in adversaries/competitors and covering weaknesses in oneself simultaneously constitutes an act of hypocrisy, or at the very least an act that deserves criticism. It's not, it's what every intelligent nation -- nay, every intelligent organism in the history of existence -- has done and will do.
Dear Sirmadam President,
You might have removed our Glorious People's Technology from your nuclear reactors, but we know everything that happened in there now. The nuke codes, the aliens, the frat parties you held above the spent-fuel pool with that "Lohan" girl because the glow was supposedly aphrodisiac...pah! We're way ahead of you there!
We have better nukes. Scalier aliens. Even more of your tech. And when we call in your debts...we'll have the blackmail videos from the party to make you pay! I hear some of your Cabinet members were...deeply embedded that day! Haaa hahaha*continues to laugh and cough all Sephiroth-like*...
On behalf of the People's Republic,
[signature]
Big Hoojie
PS: YES WE SPELLED "SCALIER" CORRECTLY. Our aliens are like fucking Draconians, not those starved green bean dolls with potato heads and shit.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Screw the switches, think about all of the iPhone floating around LANL (and Congress)!
Perhaps they are worried that China might take a cue from what the US did to Iran's nuclear equipment?
This FUD is just weird. Why is there a FUD campaign being waged against Huawei? And who is behind it? And what's Slashdot's motive for getting involved?
(Maybe Huawei is doing exactly what the FUDsters fear, BTW. I have no idea. I just think the FUD campaign is curious.)
for opening up China to trade. (granted he thought he was doing good by dividing the Communist bloc and weakening the Soviets)
Free unrestricted trade is NOT a 100% universally good thing, no matter how much our glorious corporations and econ professors tell us so.
This should tell you something about the USA's mental health and it's constant war on everything.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
This would be another reason not to allow personal cellphones in secure and sensitive work areas. If the FBI can turn on mobsters' phone mics (and therefore cameras), so can the Peoples' Central Committee.
So much time and effort goes into all this philosophizing and speculating. How about reverse-engineering the things and find out if the code does anything evil? It's worth a try at least.
See, shit like this is why I am a libertarian. Instead of pulling "risky" equipment, we should be privatizing ALL the services that USE the equipment and just let the invisible hand of the free market fix any and all security problems.
Cisco or Juniper just received a big contract to supply Chinese made goods from a US Brand name Manufacturer.
It just goes to show how screwed up our government is, really. If somebody in the NSA would dissect one of these systems and say "there's where the security hole is" it would be of real benefit to the rest of us who support lots of shops with a variety of gear. If there isn't anything to worry about then just tell those idiots on capitol hill to STFU! Oh wait, we're talking congress right? Never mind.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
All Los Alamos staff have been ordered to change the combination on their safe if Dr. Feynman has been seen in their office.
Get rid of tech just because it was made in China? This worked really well for the Nazi when they got rid of "Jewish Science".
Oh those devious Chinese. You can never trust them.
Cisco switches are made in China, with chinese-made components - that is, the nice ASICs put in the switches, the perfect place to put the backdoors.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Hardware and chips are about the most obvious attack vector for USA defense hardware there is. I seriously doubt that more than half of our radio transmission equipment would work 15 minutes into a conflict with China, since this too is an obvious weak point. I expect that hardware generated viruses would take out quite a bit of our tactical grids as well. It's what I would do, if I were them.
Bottom line. We can't buy *ANY* defense equipment from overseas, directly or indirectly, without increasing security risks significantly.
Not that anyone cares, of course. Politicians just want to reduce costs. So do contractors and subcontractors. Monitoring all this costs money and nobody wants to be accused of "regulation" or being against globalization, and so we seal our own eventual military doom.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Roadhouse.
Alliteration.
Is this an admission that they don't insist on full access to firmware code on the equipment they buy? If so then they are inherently more dangerous than any Japanese nuclear plant, don't you think?
Based on available classified and unclassified information, Huawei and ZTE cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems
This, coming from a nation that once rigged Zerox machines to covertly capture soviet documents, and rigged a SCADA controller to turn a gas pipeline into a 3 kiloton bomb in siberia.
Yeah, I think that's the point. It's not hypocrisy, it's making sure our own methods aren't used against us. I think you missed that point entirely. Also worth noting is that it's one thing when a country you have entirely embargoed, with only specific exceptions, steals technology from you which you then sabotage to piss in their canteen. It's another entirely when your largest economic trading partner abuses that relationship, by sabotaging the very items they worked hard to get you to buy in the first place.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
For critical applications, one can use a White Rabbit switch. White Rabbit is a technology developed at CERN and other institutes and companies. The switch PCB is Open Source (licensed under the CERN Open Hardware Licence) and all the switching happens inside an FPGA for which all VHDL sources are available under LGPL. There is already one company commercializing it, but the sources are all available for any other company to build it, test it, commercialize it and provide support. The terms of the licence give no privilege to any single vendor. No royalties, no patents. Plus the HDL can be customized for particular applications (low latency, redundancy...).
This bollox for even thogh the switches such as cisco dell and hp are also made in china. all asics are made in china (most) so whats the difference..
This appears to be a step taken to placate a nervous Congress, rather in response to any detected security issues.
But there *are* glaring security issues, with at least some of their products.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229785/Hackers_reveal_critical_vulnerabilities_in_Huawei_routers_at_Defcon
see subject