Trump declares emergency over IT threats
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
So let's just back up a little: A Chinese equipment manufacturer left a telnet daemon running on a single version of a single device and a national emergency is declared, Cisco leaves SSH credentials (public and private keys leaked) hard coded into multiple generations of routers over several years and not a peep..?
When is the US going to tell us what these Chinese manufacturers are up to? Heck when are they going to tell the UK's own security services? Just telling us why we should be concerned seems far more productive and effective than their current strategy that is marred by accusations of protectionism.
I'm not even saying the US are wrong. I am saying the lack of specific technical information undercuts their whole position.
I've said in a recent comment: It doesn't matter if Huawei is entirely innocent right now. China is a major competitor to the US as a global power - militarily. politically, economically. If people think they wouldn't at some point in the future use Huawei's ties deep into cellular infrastructure to serve China's needs, they're incredibly naive.
Hell, none of this is unprecedented. The whole debacle with all the ties between Republican representatives or people in Trump's campaign and Russia alone should give pause. Or Russia's meddling in the US election. Or Russia's meddling in Eastern Europe (Ukraine wishes somebody would give a geopolitical shit right now). And somehow Huawei, and by extension China, are supposed to be impartial and innocent and not a potential threat? Really?
I don't just mean theoretical work. I mean production ready stuff that is useable, like most commercialized solutions are, but also actually secure. Doing both is difficult. seL4 is useable and in fact is being tested in U.S. drones. Why didn't the NSA do something like seL4? Instead we get seLinux which isn't even secure--anything running on Linux is as a practical matter exploitable on the first day it ships.
Our communications and control systems are so fundamentally insecure it hardly matters whether it's sourced from Huawei or not--it's six of one or a half-dozen of the other, except one of those cartons is at least substantially cheaper than the other.
The fact of the matter is that the commercial industry will never develop and deliver secure products on their own. They've never done this well, and are probably fundamentally incapable of doing so because most of the benefits of a secure product inure to the public generally. Commercial vendors can't capture the value provided by secure solutions. It's up to the public--government, academia, open source community, etc--to invest in and develop the fundamental building blocks of secure systems.
Importantly, the entire stack doesn't need to be secure. We can write secure networked systems for the Internet because we presume the network is hostile. There's no reason that cellular radios should be a trusted component of a wireless cellular network. They are because (1) it's just cheaper to do it that way (see above) and (2) the U.S. government spent decades sabotaging cryptography generally and cellular standards specifically, which means even 5G standards are fundamentally broken from a design perspective.
So the whole Huawei controversy deserves a giant eye roll. All of the arguments about why Huawei can't be trusted are irrelevant. Huawei shouldn't be trusted, but neither should Qualcomm or any of these other vendors. Rather, we should set transparency standards and verify that they're being met. But doing so requires a ridiculous amount of work up and down the software and hardware stack, starting from the design stage; work that the U.S. government isn't actually doing but, in fact, still sabotaging!
Timeline: https://www.computerworlduk.com/security/huawei-controversie...
Cisco makes some backbone equipment. They were trying hard to sell a LTE "virtualized" core when I previously worked at $wireless_telco, but cisco does not make RAN components.
The only US based company I know of that is has licensed products in production use by a major telcom is Airspan [1]
So Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, etc. will not be affected.
"Mr Trump does not name any company specifically in the order."
I'm guessing they are called emergencies as they await for the threat to emerge. Which kinda seems at odds with my definition of emergencies - which would be a defined clear-cut issue that needs addressing.
All this effectively does is hurt and curtail legit business with fair and good foreign telecom providers who have now been bundeled via red-tape into the same collection as those unnamed less fair and good foreign telecom providers.
Expect a fall-out of how this will hurt and impact legit businesses over the coming days and weeks. Let alone touch upon the possible impact upon Americans using their provider SIM and roaming abroad.