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Huawei's Equipment Poses 'Significant' Security Risks, UK Says (cnbc.com)
The U.K. government warned on Thursday Huawei's telecommunications equipment raises "significant" security issues, posing a possible setback to the Chinese tech firm as it looks to build out 5G networks. From a report: In 46-page report evaluating Huawei's security risks, British officials stopped short of calling for a ban of Huawei's 5G telecommunications equipment. But the assessment cited "underlying defects" in the company's software engineering and cybersecurity processes, citing "significantly increased risk to U.K. operators." The findings give weight to warnings from U.S. officials who have argued Huawei's networking equipment could be used for espionage by the Chinese government. Huawei has repeatedly said it does not pose any risk and insists it would not share customer data with Beijing. In a statement Thursday, Huawei said it takes the U.K. government's findings "very seriously."
And it continues. Even if Huawei earnestly means that they won't collaborate with Beijing, when your engineering security is so lax then it seems reasonable to expect that Beijing will find ways to make use of it (just like any other large government would).
It's just another example of corporate balances not finding a decent center for security versus productivity and profit. We all still have a long way to go.
How does it compare to the competition? It's not like there's been too much of a stellar privacy and security conscious record in the whole industry...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If I were driving Hauwei at this point I would open-source all the software running on my devices. Their competitive edge is in slave-labor manufacturing and insane levels of customer financing, not technical innovation.
Of course they would still have to address the possibility of silicon or FPGA based backdoors but that might be worked out in a similar way.
Remember when the UK supported the US fantasy of WMD in Iraq?
The US says "jump". The UK government asks "how high?"
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Nah, it sounds like Huawei holds most of the patents on 5G infrastructure and is years ahead of everyone else getting hardware to market. So now all the US companies that make similar equipment are losing contracts to Huawei, so the government decided to help them out by raising some "security concerns".
It's the least they could do after the NSA was caught red handed systematically backdooring Cisco hardware.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
One flaw with your analysis: there are almost no US companies that make similar equipment. At most, you have a Cisco or something that produces a small subsegment of the Huawei portfolio. Even the Pentagon, when talking about 5G, essentially says that the only alternatives are European suppliers like Ericsson or Nokia.