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India Bars ZTE, Huawei, Others From Sensitive Government Projects
hypnosec writes "The Indian Government has decided it won't be using telecom equipment from international vendors, and has barred all such foreign companies from participating in the US$3.8 billion National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN) project — a project aimed at bringing high-speed Internet connectivity to the rural areas of India. The DoT has decided that it will be going ahead with 100 per cent domestic sourcing and has released a list of certified GPON suppliers. This decision comes after the research wing of the ministry, C-DoT, advised the telecom department to bar Chinese companies like ZTE and Huawei, keeping in line with a similar decision by the U.S. In an internal memo, the research body advised the department that both these Chinese companies are a security threat to the telecom world."
Why use fiber when it would be so much cheaper to line up a bunch of tech support employees and pass the information along in a game of 'telephone'.
Yes, I'm a cruel cruel man!
Okay, I'm not a big conspiracy theorist. But if there isn't a good chance of a backdoor in their software, I'm a monkey's uncle. Aren't these companies partly owned by the People's Liberation Army?
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
That a large shout goes out to China saying "We dont Trust you" from the rest of the world.
Yet the rest of the world still insists on using the large, cheap, suicidal and robotic workforce of China to produce it's consumer goods!
Just wait until the Water Cooler starts listening in on your breaktime chats about the latest developments in secret tech.... ;)
Did the govt also consider components(chips, circuitry, software) in locally sourced hardware also are not made outside India or are open-source. India does not have expertise in chip manufacturing except potato chips.
the department went all-in and has barred international companies including Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Alcatel Lucent.
Donde cenizas quedan fuego hubo
I support that.
I think the US should try to get its key tech from local companies, too. and their suppliers and their suppliers.
we are *too* globalized. somehow, we went too far in that direction and people are just mindlessly forging forever forward and not stopping to think.
countries are not permanent friends. its unwise to be too global.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
"In an internal memo, the research body advised the department that both these Chinese companies are a security threat to the telecom world"
You mean becoming completely dependent on another country, a specific company, etc. for resources, especially defense critical resources, can be a 'security threat'? Really?
No shit. I know I left that clue bat laying around here somewhe....
They want it to be spent locally, where the voters live.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Set up an Indian company, reassemble China made product, and claim made in Indian and sell it to the government Dead simple.
The whole fucking outsourcing is National Security threat. American's should stop that.
And Americans? They infected Indian land with Parthenium hysterophorus. They can not be trusted.
And Chinese? No one trusts them anyway.
I think its good for man kind to go back to strict national boundaries. No outside import/export. Less interaction, less friction.
Do these guys still use windoze?
The Chinese won't care. They don't need infrastructure access when the individual users are using ZTE/Huawei equipments (phones, ADSL modems, etc.) themselves.
So who are the Indian equivalents of Cisco, Avaya, Juniper, Brocade, et al? Yeah, they do have domestic Telecom companies like Airtel, Reliance Communications, but others? Only one I can think of is iBaton (Apple hasn't sued them for using I before the product name) which makes networking equipment like switches & routers. Otherwise, everything there is the usual DLink, Linksys, Cisco and so on.
It makes more sense if the Indians were to just ban Chinese companies, like Huawei and ZTE from the action
The NOFN project is to be NOFORN? Hahahahahah... sorry, couldn't help myself.
The US sold photocopiers to the Russian government and were recording every document during the cold war. Why wouldn't China do the same with cellphones and networks? I am actualy more concerend about Google then any particular country. They have little trackers everywhere and collect "anonymous" data from cellphones for traffic maps. I bet they could pin point when you are at your computer based on your browsing profile. Imagine sending a friendly bomb locked on to an internet or cell connection.
Google bad!
Oh and a few years ago they blocked all Muslim you tube videos in Canada. :) Thank god for the onion and live leak. Without them I would never get to the real source of the story.
When manufacturing equipment in China, India, Eastern Europe and Russia, it's modus operandi to place backdoors in hardware and software to ensure payment is received. If you think your nascent wall street investor or American Corporate Executive has anything on what these guys try to pull off on a daily basis, think again. Government corruption overseas is easily a hundred times worse than it is here.
It's almost of absolute certainty the backdoors placed in Huewei's and ZTE's kit was placed there by contract submanufacturers. It takes a government like China to view that as a value added feature and push for deployment in overseas systems. In all likelihood nobody knew about it except for the Chinese Government who's cybercorps actively search out and catalog such exploits.
The difference with American companies is they know they will be held responsible for any intentionally installed back-doors in a court of law should shazbot really hit the fan. The Sony Rootkit Fiasco resulted in a class action lawsuit which while itself is a joke, did get them on the short list of hactivist groups and the Sony Playstation Network being down for near 2 months really trashed the console. Although one can say Sony had it coming; the original playstation was designed as an add-on to the original SNES and Sony ganked it and all the rights and entered the market with it nearly killing Nintendo at the time. Due to that and other reasons, The company is now circling the bowl.
Even without backdoors or intentional bugs that can be exploited to gain access, Huawei engineers hired/coerced by the government would be very useful in finding exploits in Huawei products.
Source code is only useful if you can be certain that the compiled code comes from the source code you reviewed, similarly design diagram is only useful if you are certain the actual hardware follows the diagram given to you; and this will need to be checked for every unit you bought.
It isn't a coincidence that India agrees with the US on building out by using local talent. Europe will follow suit in each nation state, and South America will do the same. China's stranglehold on cheap materials/labor is no longer the driving factor in manufacturing. The top manufacturers in China are working on investing in foreign lands to avoid losing their present contracts. Over time, they'll lose them. It's an economic/intelligence/political trifecta approach to breaking China's dominance on flooding world markets and thus driving down competiting economies. In short, US, Euro and other nation states corporations realize that game is up. They know the import/export tariff imbalance days are over.
We hear national security and we all start thinking espionage and conspiracy theories. Truth is that economic losses can be just as devastating. All that expensive equipment needs regular servicing to function properly. All China would have to do is bar Huawei from offering its services in India and all that vital equipment is rather quickly going to turn into very expensive junk, leading to downtime and huge losses for whatever services rely on them. In its current spat with Japan, China proved more than willing to use economic warfare in disputes.
I can see why they are worried about it.
The only problem is why didn't they see the problem when the USA were selling kit to everyone (with deliberate holes in it)?
Surely, too, India should be forbidding Microsoft Windows, right?
Or is that going to have them invaded for Un-American Activities?
Any competent buyer large enough can TEST the equipment, set a honeypot(s) and feed it replayed information.
You log the PSW and logic outputs. If they can't diss-assemble the code or do machine code, then they are not competent.
You can use open source to log and record events.
Otherwise core competency has been lost and they are just cargo cult administrators and drones.
The only threat is that the devices wipe their memory(self destruct) and become bricks (sony and apple know about that).
For a cheap labor country, overcome by having the basics to re-flash.
If they dont know software, dont have software test engineers worth tuppence, and don't know hardware at the component level, then yes, they will have to both trust another foreign power AND hope another foreign power is not sitting on many zero day exploits.
While hardware and router is a biggish deal, you have to balance risk - what if MS OS went down too. Why worry about routers when farms and boxes can be 'owned' .
Throw in some big brand high end stuff and you have no single point of failure.
"The difference with American companies is they know they will be held responsible for any intentionally installed back-doors in a court of law should shazbot really hit the fan"
AT&T.
Nuff said.
(Sony made billions on their rootkit and paid millions in fines. Hell, Jammie Thomas was put up for a fine bigger than they were for only 22 tracks! So your example is complete bollocks too.)
IDK what the big deal is. USA does the same thing. Case in point: A few years ago someone involved in our country's military aviation told that they could not even use electric wiring from the USA to build their aircraft, due to inclusion of some "bugs" that would enable tracking of aircraft even when radar is down or stealth tech is employed (I'm necessarily vague here). Don't know how much more lowtech one want's to go than copper wire.
That is, until Americans wants something Made in the USA again. That kind of Nationalism is RACIST!
India needs to
* force the Chinese to build the components inside India
* limit the contract to 5 yrs
* send them packing after Indian skills can handle the work
Just like the Chinese do to western companies bidding on contracts inside China. Ask Siemens, GE, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, etc.....
As a number of posters have indicated, this is all smoke and mirror for effect. ...who ever pays the most bribe.
India simply cannot manufacture it's own hardware (some would contend this even extends to software).
Everything will go through some Indian sub that farms contracts back to Huawei, ZTE,
From the article, it seems all foreign companies, including companies in US and European, are excluded from the project.
It's much simpler than the security angle.
The decision makers got paid off by a local giant, who wanted to bar Chinese competition.
The Chinese competitors were disbarred on 'security concerns'
It doesn't matter whether or not there IS a backdoor. All that matters is that their MIGHT be a backdoor.
Indian Dept of Telecom: We're banning Huawei on hearing reports of security concerns by the US and Australia.
US House Intelligence Committee: We're banning Huawei on hearing reports of security concerns by India and Australia.
Australian Security Intelligence Organization: We're banning Huawei on hearing reports of security concerns by the US and India.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog