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Secret Chips in Replacement Parts Can Completely Hijack Your Phone's Security (arstechnica.com)
Dan Goodin, writing for ArsTechnica: People with cracked touch screens or similar smartphone maladies have a new headache to consider: the possibility the replacement parts installed by repair shops contain secret hardware that completely hijacks the security of the device. The concern arises from research that shows how replacement screens -- one put into a Huawei Nexus 6P and the other into an LG G Pad 7.0 -- can be used to surreptitiously log keyboard input and patterns, install malicious apps, and take pictures and e-mail them to the attacker. The booby-trapped screens also exploited operating system vulnerabilities that bypassed key security protections built into the phones. The malicious parts cost less than $10 and could easily be mass-produced. Most chilling of all, to most people, the booby-trapped parts could be indistinguishable from legitimate ones, a trait that could leave many service technicians unaware of the maliciousness. There would be no sign of tampering unless someone with a background in hardware disassembled the repaired phone and inspected it. The research, in a paper presented this week (PDF) at the 2017 Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies, highlights an often overlooked disparity in smartphone security. The software drivers included in both the iOS and Android operating systems are closely guarded by the device manufacturers, and therefore exist within a "trust boundary."
Apple and Samsung devices and software have been evaluated and validated against FIPS 140-2, Common Criteria and Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) standards and are considered safe enough for use by the US government and others which respect those certifications (such as the 20+ countries in the Common Criteria Recognition Agreement).
Huawei has financial and political ties to the Chinese government, which has a well known history of taking "cyber" action for both political and industrial espionage purposes, in addition to siding with adversarial countries such as Russia, North Korea, etc. on a number of issues.
Therefor, Apple and Samsung are probably better choices from a trustworthiness standpoint. On the other hand, they're largely manufactured and assembled in the PRC and would be targets for the kind of supply-chain-infiltration type hardware implant attack. It'd just be less easy to accomplish than embedding implants or back doors into the hardware of one of their own companies.