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Comment by ses1984 | Hacker News Reader

ses1984

I thought the sanctions on Huawei were about stopping the penetration of Chinese devices into American networks and businesses for security reasons.

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The official reason is that they exported US tech to Iran. But its pretty obvious the whole thing is political. Even trump contradicted the official reason a day later.

> Even trump contradicted the official reason a day later.

It would by now be more worrying if he didn't.

The original sanction charge on Huawei was for selling American equipment to Iran, and all the financial transactions related to hiding that. Stealing trade secrets and patent infringement is usually fine and a block on specific products and were tacked on later.

That might have been one of the stated reasons. But I think it was protect the profit margins of several well-connected US Manufacturers notorious for expensive, high margin equipment.

If that were the case, wouldn't Ericsson and Nokia also be on the naughty list?

That's what they tell you.

No one has actually managed to find and actual security reasons not to accept Huawei devices. There were some really poorly informed stories that listed standard features (telnet support in routers) and tried to play them up as a sinister commie plot but they were all pretty laughable. Most countries (for instance here in the UK) assess infrastructure equipment, providers can only buy from the approved and have for decades. Huawei always passed those tests with flying colours.

But I guess "chinese spies eat telecoms babies" is a much more dramatic headline...

Sure, backdoors will slip under security audits, until one day they're revealed and you find out you've been pwnt all along.

I don't think the US is innocent either, of course tech that we use internally and export is probably backdoored out the wazoo.

I would rather assume almost everything I use is backdoored one way or another, and operate that assumption, rather than assume the opposite to be true and be wrong.

It's not a dramatic headline. Governments spying on each other and their citizens is the boring default state of the things.

It's important not to shift the goalposts. Western security establishments are concerned that once Huawei has overwhelming marketshare in systems like 5G networks, they will have the ability to use these against target nations. They (at least the credible agencies) are not claiming that current Huawei devices are backdoored now.

Even if you believe the worst about China and Huawei, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of strategic sense for them to implant backdoors into products now, when marketshare is still small and growing rapidly. You'd add the backdoors once you had network dominance, like the US did.

> Huawei always passed those tests with flying colours.

Those tests have usually identified several issues, and Huawei has been slow to address them. For example, one of the conclusions of the 2019 report [1] was that "No material progress has been made on the issues raised in the previous 2018 report" Some of these issues are known vulnerabilities in old versions of dependencies like OpenSSL that Huawei has forked and then neglected to update.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/huawei-cyber-secu...

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