I don't understand this at all... if the communications across the cable are properly secured then it shouldn't matter what cables it runs across.
Similarly, it's understandable that the Chinese want to start building their own backbone infrastructure so they're cannot be cut off from the world if they end up in a conflict with the U.S.. From that perspective, it makes sense that Huawei would start laying these cables. It can be seen as a defensive move.
I've long been wondering whether the Chinese have subverted IP infrastructure hardware, which is all produced in China, often by Chinese companies like TP-Link. How much of that stuff has a kill switch in it that they can activate if a conflict with the West breaks out?
Perhaps the higher end, non-consumer facing, equipment might have it. But for the cheap tp-link devices I highly doubt it.
All the more reason it's not in the cheap TP-Link routers but in the mobile phone chips which can't be examined so easily.
Won't 5G also have dedicated hardware?
> srsENB has been tested and validated with the following handsets:
LG Nexus 5 and 4
Motorola Moto G4 plus and G5
Huawei P9/P9lite, P10/P10lite, P20/P20lite
Huawei dongles: E3276 and E398That's a very limited set of handsets. I wonder what's stopping them from adding support for more devices: Is it lack of contributors (no traction, lack of interest), or the cost of development (insanely difficult to reverse engineer, potential IP infringement etc), or limited and buggy functionality (doesn't work with certain carriers etc)?
How is not critical one might ask - the amount of battery time when power goes down. It's in range of minutes, sometimes there isn't even a UPS.
Meltdown was only discovered last year, despite being a vulnerability in virtually all Intel CPUs made since 1995. I suspect there are substantially more eyeballs on Intel, too.
Nobody can afford this in breadth. Granted, you can manufacture a rigged batch and keep it secret. But you can't have a broad capability and expect it to remain secret for long.
I guess they consider their own country to just be a large intranet, and the internet- the web between countries, is the thing they want neutral? Politics is not fun to deal with.
I imagine every undersea cable would be cut in the first week of a US-China conflict, regardless of who built it.
I don't think you're thinking like a military person.
I mean, if it's total war? Well, sorry, but it's total war.
I wouldn't count on too many undersea cables not being cut.
Given the manoeuvring requirements for the orbiting explosives, and the requirement to launch them with enough plausible deniability for it not to be obvious "there's a bunch of commercial satellite killers!" - I wonder if they could build and launch 60 of them for less than SpaceX paid to get the first 60 Starlink birds in orbit?
Nevertheless, this is such a terrible idea, I hope this is not the future.
Very very big...
A China-US conflict means dozens of nuclear weapons dropped on populous cities across the world in a matter of hours.
How anyone seriously entertains this idea is unreal.
An example of what limited conflict looks like is the Sino-Indian war which was kept confined to a limited geographic area. Its not a forgone conclusion that a conflict has to become "total".
most likely at sea
An oceanic conflict in the Pacific is going to ruin air traffic, and with both air and sea lanes compromised, you see the beginnings of blockades and economic business as usual encounters entanglements all over.
If big expensive ships start sinking, and the projection of air power changes, everything else heats up very quickly, because replacing military fleets (and the sailors to match) is a slow process, and any major setback could prove permanent and lasting.
Don't expect a naval limited war to stay limited for long.
Few and big backbones are responsable for almost all traffic. Few and big CDNs serving most of the contents that are used by everybody. Even few apps are "essential" for daily life.
Big money was/is created when internet become business as usual: few and big corps taking the biggest share.
Platforms like this are common for submarine applications: http://carrier.huawei.com/en/products/fixed-network/transmis...
I think the history of human communications is an ample demonstration of why this is a poor assumption.
The US spent billions routing international telecom infrastructure through US and allied points of presence for a reason.
When they don't usually means something else is the problem.
Source? Encryption has not been treated as a munition by the United States since the 90s.
Far as export, I looked into that in 2014. I found that only a few things, like mass market and ecommerce, got reclassified. High-assurance systems (EAL6/7) they couldnt hack were still munitions. So were custom crypto and some other things. People got fooled: NSA reclassified just the stuff they'd be able to hack anyway. Big progress but not what people thought.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/11/the_return_of...
They tried to pull more crap about a year after I wrote that:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2925339/us-proposes-ti...
I don't know what current state of affairs is. I assume they've set it up where they can deny selectively if they feel the need to. So far, most "security" products are too insecure for them to need to do that.
If availability is compromised, that is obvious to the end user(s).
Availability is still important, but, as I said, much less important than integrity. (The importance of confidentiality varies.)
And having a problem you know about is pretty much always a significant upgrade compared to having a problem you don't know about.
Especially when it comes to attacking infrastructure, removing the availability of operations on this infrastructure is a good attack vector. This can be done by, for example, creating a temporary ban on logging in. It can be done by reporting a hacking attempt from the legitimate IP address range.
It's possible, perhaps even likely that all communications would be recorded for decryption later when if / new techniques become available.
Spoofing IP's alone isn't enough, but CA infrastructure is very much based on a trust that is weaker than we'd like to admit.
Plus, it’s not just about access. A malicious actor could always damage or destroy the cable, cutting off a primary channel of communications.
If you're an ISP, Netflix will even send you (free!) servers for this. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
startyourownisp.com
Also note that would be the backbone encryption channels, but inside those people would be using https which is encryption further up the networking stack.
It's encrypted turtles all the way down.