Germany Refuses To Ban Huawei, Citing Lack of Real Evidence (phys.org)

hackingbear writes: Germany's IT watchdog has expressed skepticism about calls for a boycott of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, saying it has seen no evidence the firm could use its equipment to spy for Beijing, news weekly Spiegel reported. "For such serious decisions like a ban, you need proof," the head of Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), Arne Schoenbohm, told Spiegel, adding that his agency had no such evidence. The U.S. has been pressuring German authorities for months to drop Huawei, according to people familiar with the matter, but the Germans have asked for more specific evidence to demonstrate the security threat. German authorities and telecom executives have yet to turn up any evidence of security problems with Chinese equipment vendors, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Separately, at a (secret lobster-themed) meeting in Canada in July 2018, espionage chiefs from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S. -- all signatories to a treaty on signals intelligence, and often referred to as the "Five Eyes" -- agreed to do their best to contain the global growth of Chinese telecom (vendor) Huawei, the Australian Financial Review reported (paywalled). On the other hand, documents leaked by WikiLeaks and Snowden claimed that the NSA, the leader of the Five Eyes, tapped German Chancellery for decades and bugged routers made by Cisco, the leading American networking equipment vendor.

Comments

It's a network design question.

[Sique]

What would happen if you route the traffic through your network in a way that it always goes from a Huawei to a Cisco and from a Cisco to a Huawei? Will now the NSA know what the Chinese are spying at, and the Chinese get all the INTEL NSA is looking for?

Or will the Huawei block all steganographically embedded traffic to the NSA, while the Cisco deflects all secret traffic to the Chinese Ministry of State Security?

What a conundrum!

Re: And why not?

[saider]

The Five Eyes are concerned, not because the Chinese might spy, but because the Chinese equipment does not enable *them* to spy.

It is about the future - not right now.

[willy_me]

The problem that Huawei potentially brings is that the Chinese government could force them to embed spying functions into future firmware updates. Such a move would be difficult to counter once a country is highly reliant on Huawei for providing cell services. I am not suggesting that Huawei wants to so - but the Chinese government could easily dictate that they do so. In most other countries such requests would be challenged in court. For example, like how Apple refused to unlock a shooters iPhone a couple of years back. In China, we would never even know.

Re:Nice one

[bill_mcgonigle]

The NSA doesn't care about Chinese spying. They care about people using network gear they can't get a foothold in.

There are dozens of Snowden files on these topics.