The title of this article is misleading. "Backdoor" implies a deliberate mechanism built into the software, but here there's no evidence that the vulnerability wasn't simply a mistake.
If Huawei wanted to do this the smart way they would implement a backdoor that's VERY tough to find but could also be justified by stupidity.
This way they have plausible deniability.
"We're not malicious. We just screwed up!"
If it was obvious the Chinese government did this, then other world governments would have to respond with sanctions and import bans.
That being said, there is value in a LPE as a part of a bigger exploit chain. There's all sorts of exploits that'll give you relatively unprivileged code execution, and you'd want to silently elevate in order to make yourself persistent for instance.
Like I said, I think this is just a bug, but Windows LPEs do have value.
Then when someone says: "Huawei pwns us", they can just claim ignorance and stupidity because a small mistake here and there provides better deniability than some whitehat finding out that Huawei provides the Chinese government with the whole set of keys to the kingdom.
The Snowden files said nothing about Intel’s ME. That isn’t a backdoor either. It’s a great place to put one, but there are lots of great places to put backdoors, and that doesn’t mean that’s what the manufacturer is doing.
There have been cases where specific things were targeted. This isn’t even close to every piece of hardware.
“There are no mistakes” is a ridiculous notion for anyone who has ever had a career tangentially related to software or hardware. I don’t know how someone who holds this viewpoint even managed to find this website. You really don’t think bugs ever happen by accident?
This is a great website for freely expressing opinions, truth, lies and such!
Peace be with you.
Do you have any examples?
So what, you want proof that the backdoor is deliberate? To do that, you'd either need some sort of internal directive from up top (good luck finding that), or the backdoor was comically bad (eg. if (signed by PLA) return true;).
If the title of the article is "backdoor found", then yeah. I'm of the opinion that it was an intentional backdoor too, I think that was a pretty clear possibility to anyone who saw the initial writeup. But to come out and claim unambiguously that it was a backdoor is masquerading an opinion as news.
It would be more entertaining if I thought other vendors were less likely to be compromised[1].
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/12/researchers-solve-the-juniper-...
Seems like a very reasonable request.
The strictly local nature of this "backdoor" strongly suggests that it is not in fact a backdoor, if you're going to call it a backdoor maybe you should have the least bit of evidence to support that.
If the US security sector blew the lid on the backdoors, they would also be exposing their own backdoors, thus all they can do is generate FUD towards Huawei, and hope that they never need to present evidence.