How come I've never heard of this???
It also makes sense why the US is banning Huawei equipment. If the US can do it, why can't the Chinese?
It also makes sense why the US is banning Huawei equipment. If the US can do it, why can't the Chinese?
You can't trust the network. Rather than trying to avoid Huawei, energy should be spent engineering things so Huawei equipment doesn't need to be trusted. Until then, China and everybody will continue to be able to snoop, regardless of who built the network components.
There's also the drama last year where US claimed Huawei technicians was helping Uganda and Zambia spy on political opponents. Political opponents being Washington friendly anti-establishment candidates, and helping being acceding to request for lawful interception duties as vendor. To be fair the technicians also helped used Israeli spyware to extract Whatsapp data. The TL;DR of the entire debacle being Chinese hardware actively undermines US foreign influence operations abroad.
*I surmise the reason US is having so much trouble producing convincing evidence of Huawei malfeasance is that China actually haven't exploited Huawei hardware because they don't want to risk damaging the brand's reputation. That's not to say China doesn't spy, of course they do. They just have the capability to do so without going through Huawei.
I wish this "useful idiot" chatter would stop.
Their founder is former Chinese army.
There is a Defcon talk on how bad their security is on medium-sized devices.
With that as a starting point, why would you ever trust Huawei?
Also lots of devices with bad security and spaghetti code. Huawei is probably the most scrutinized vendor in the last decade, national and private investigators from a host of countries found nothing to suggest links to Chinese espionage. Hundreds of mobile operators with years of experience found nothing. NSA with access to Huawei internal networks found nothing. GCHQ with Huawei code to audit found nothing. The only people who claim to have evidence but steadfastly refuse to release any until recently is current US administration with Mike Pompeo leading the charge. Which turned out to be non specific claims about legally mandated lawful interception function, aka Vodaphone SSH tier of vapidness. Unsurprisingly, this has convinced no new countries, and the countries have firm banned Huawei all have exeptional dependence on US security and intelligence sharing. With all that as the starting point, why would you ever trust allegations?
Even straight from this article:
>So one other - there was another Swiss company at the time - Gretag is what it was called - that was trying to become a rival to Crypto. And the CIA and U.S. intelligence helped to sort of orchestrate smear campaigns around the world to spread disinformation that Gretag's devices couldn't be trusted; there were vulnerabilities in them.
The playbook hasn't changed. Neither have the interests. There's nothing wrong with US intelligence pursing self interest based purely on the fact that Chinese are security competitors despite complete lack of evidence. But the only useful idiots are people who believe the US smear campaign around Huawei blindly.
Why would you ever trust any US corporations?
Snowden, Intel Management Engine etc.
(Corporate) backdoors everywhere...
I think RISC-V, open hardware and OSS has to be the future.
And like 70% of all Silicon Valley big firms have been founded with direct help from In-Q-Tel....
Which leaves three explainations:
1. The chinese are so good the 5 eyes can't proof it
2. The 5 eyes can proof it but don't dare to for certain reasons (which wont stop independend researchers)
3. It doesn't actually happen (yet)
Meanwhile we've got tons of actual backdoors from the US side.
The U.S. government could divulge credible information about a particular Huawei attack, especially if it were as pervasive as they seem to claim. I can think of many reasons why they wouldn't do this (e.g. exploits make more than just Huawei look bad, such as other American suppliers), but few that bolster their case against Huawei as a distinct threat to telecommunications security.
Rather, it seems their beef with Huawei is two-fold: 1) generalized national security interest in preventing China from dominating the telecommunications market (i.e. concern over relative tactical and strategic positions of China and U.S. SIGINT capabilities), and 2) protecting the profit margins of Qualcomm and other American suppliers.
>Malcolm Turnbull has warned Boris Johnson that allowing Chinese company Huawei to build Britain's 5G network would compromise the ability of the Five Eyes countries to collect and share intelligence.
>Mr Turnbull said the main risk the Australian security agencies had identified was not through potential Chinese interception of intelligence but by denial of access to the network.
If you follow the story closely, the intelligence community began to intervene loudly once US escalated to severing intelligence sharing if countries didn't ban all Huawei gear. To the point where you have UK firing defense minister over Huawei leak. Which is understandable, FVEY domestic security is built around hacking each other's citizens to get around domestic legislation and only NSA has access to western tech giants.
Did this make the news? I've never heard of it.
Yes, Israel usually gets a pass on espionage, and Russian election interference is a years-long story. But in any particular incident it's hard to tell whether the public is disinterested in the incident or disinterested in the adversary. Plus, to be fair, reports of actual Russian incidents are fairly common. I mean, they've literally built a niche industry for social media hacking. Reporting on it is easy; you don't need to wait for intelligence leaks. And they publicly gloat about their strategy and tactics. By contrast, Israel is usually far more discrete[1] and publicly identified incidents are few and far between.
[1] Operationally and politically. They certainly don't gloat. They stick to a very strict recitation: "Israel does not spy against the United States."
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house...
(and the government response)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-spying-israel-pm-be...
So one can assume that major governments are operating their own stingers in DC.
For the lazy, a 3G tower dev kit from Range Networks is $8,000 [1].
I've never done it, but I suppose you could use 2 SDRs. One for setting up OpenBTS, one for jamming 4G/LTE.
Fake base station attacks do not work with 4G/5G, but a downgrade attack to 2G might still be possible.
This might well be a plausible reason why this old story resurfaced recently.