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Engineer security

Is Huawei in your network a national security concern?

I am reminded that yesterday’s post on how would Huawei spy on your network has an additional dimension in the UK in that a significant chunk of BT’s 21CN infrastructure is based on the Chinese vendor’s kit. I hadn’t noticed that this hit the headlines a couple of months ago.

The BT Huawei deal would have been based on very attractive commercials spread over the lifetime of the contract. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on its wisdom from a national security perspective. I don’t have any details to suppose there is a risk other than what I already covered yesterday and then I couldn’t assess the level of risk. That’s somebody’s job.

One wonders whether the powers that be might be might at this very moment be redrawing rules of engagement for secure national networks roll-outs. I can’t imagine that UK defence networks touch any part of 21CN anyway. They will be totally separate. Won’t they?

Access to non defence networks that are strategic could also be a problem. For example how are all our power stations connected? The telecommunications infrastructure itself? Imagine if nobody could make a phone call or send an email for a week? How about the oil refineries? No oil = everywhere grinds to a halt. I’m sure you can come up with other scenarios.

I dunno.

PS takes me a while to catch up with the news, I know.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

4 replies on “Is Huawei in your network a national security concern?”

There’s this place called CSEC (Cyber Security Evaluation Centre) which is as far as I understand supposed to be where UK folks can scrutinise at a very low level all the stuff Huawei make and check to make sure they’re not sneaking anything in without us knowing about it.

(http://www.huawei.com/uk/about-huawei/newsroom/press-release/hw-093468-ukcenter-security.htm)

But it has come under scrutiny recently;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23355950

A piece on the Radio 4 Today program a few days ago said that, yes, the staff their do find problems, but that’s because they do very detailed code audits and really they’re just finding occasional bugs and examples of poor development, and nothing malign.

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