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China Networking United States Hardware Politics

S. Korea Diverts Network From Huawei Networks 76

Posted by timothy from the but-the-marines-are-always-saying-huawei dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Verge: "The South Korean government has decided to route sensitive data away from networks operated by Huawei, amid longstanding fears from the U.S. that the Chinese company's infrastructure could be used to spy on communications. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the U.S. had been urging its South Korean allies to route government communications away from Huawei networks, claiming that the infrastructure could be used to spy on communications with American military bases there. As a result, Huawei equipment will not be used at any American military base in South Korea. The Obama administration denies playing a role in the decision, and South Korean officials have not commented. The Journal reports that the White House made a point of keeping the talks private because it didn't want to be seen as meddling in its ally's business affairs."
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S. Korea Diverts Network From Huawei Networks More

S. Korea Diverts Network From Huawei Networks

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  • Who cares (Score:3, Informative)

    by boorack ( 1345877 ) on Saturday February 15, 2014 @03:57AM (#46253479)
    Thank tho Snowden we now know that Cisco is even worse in that regard. So the only thing one can choose is who will be sucking one's data - US or China. There best way to keep networks safe is to roll one's own equipment (eg. PC-based with OpenBSD or something, sourced from local vendor) but it has its own limitations.

    • sourced from local vendor

      ... who just assembles chips and boards made by Chinese or US companies. Next try...

      • It might still be the best way (of various choices which are all bad in some way).

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by AK Marc ( 707885 )
        A GP chip can't spy. The complexity to be able to do any useful spying in a "random" board would make it easily discovered.

        That and the other thing missed here is Cisco has been proven to spy. Huawei hasn't. Yet companies are fleeing Huawei, but not Cisco, so it isn't as issue of spying, but racism (and yes, that term includes non-racial-based nationalism, and xenophobia).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      While communicating with the US, choose Cisco. While communicating with China, choose Huawei.

    • Re:Who cares (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Saturday February 15, 2014 @08:13AM (#46253905) Homepage

      Thank tho Snowden we now know that Cisco is even worse in that regard.

      Do we? [techinasia.com] Really? [marketwatch.com]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gmuslera ( 3436 )
      Worse than that. The one putting backdoors in Huawei networking gear [wired.com] is the NSA itself.

    • Cisco? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Thank tho Snowden we now know that Cisco is even worse in that regard.

      [citation needed]

      In what way? I am not aware of any backdoors being reported from the Snowden documents. I've seen Chinese media say that Cisco helped the NSA, but not any reports from Greenwald et al:

      http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-media-snowden-says-cisco-090020241.html

      There are reports of exploits against Cisco equipment by the NSA, but they've also attacked Juniper, Huawei, and many other vendors. So again: [citation needed].

      So while I'm not a fan of Cisco gear for other reasons (primarily budget/value pr

  • This is silly (Score:3)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Saturday February 15, 2014 @04:01AM (#46253489) Journal
    If you want to keep your data secure over a network, encrypt it (and trust the other side). That's the only way.

    This is silly stuff for the US to be worrying about. We should be generous with our friends in things that matter little, so when it comes to things that do matter, they will have confidence that we are negotiating in good faith. Why would you want to use protectionism to defend Verizon and Qualcomm? Really?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Well normally I'd agree, except I've lived in the region for a bit. Some other /.er's could probably explain better if they're more recent live-ins', but usually when the governments in the region do something like this it has more to do with industrial espionage and fear of direct, or indirect attacks against national interests. Or that there's interest in "gaining" people by kidnapping. China, who uses N.Korea as a proxy to attack it's neighbors will happily disavow everything. And there's a very lon

      • That might be a reasonable explanation, if Korea had been truly doing it of their own volition. Clearly that's not what happened here, the US pushed them towards that. For some reason the US has been really anti-Huawei, not just in Korea, but in America too.

      • China, who uses N.Korea as a proxy to attack it's neighbors

        After Chinese involvement in an attempted coup a couple of decades back they haven't gotten on very well. Of course nobody else will even talk to N.K. , let alone trade with a serious markup on everything.

        The kidnapping etc has certainly been linked to N.K. on multiple occasions - but to China? I've never heard of that one so please provide an example.

        I'm not defending China, merely pointing out that N.K. should take the blame for their own acti

    • What, and miss an opportunity to sell Cisco hardware instead of Huawei ? You don't know who pays for politicians' campaigns do you ?

    • When you are up against a superpower, encrypting your data is little, if any, protection. They have secret programs dedicated to finding weaknesses in commonly used crypto, and the money and motivation to build supercomputers to brute force your communications in reasonable time-frames, in combination with whatever weaknesses they've found.

      In addition, that only helps keeping the content of messages safe. There's a lot to be learned from info like who is sending data to who, how much data, when, etc.

      And i

      • They have secret programs dedicated to finding weaknesses in commonly used crypto, and the money and motivation to build supercomputers to brute force your communications in reasonable time-frames, in combination with whatever weaknesses they've found.

        Let's assume that your paranoia is reasonable, and somehow the NSA did find a weakness in the crypto. Then create a distribution system for a one-time pad. Unbreakable.

        • One-time pads are extremely cumbersome, and the "distribution system" of which you speak is inherently highly vulnerable to things like interception, whether of the high or low-tech sort.

          How would you propose to integrate OTPs with IPSec VPNs for instance? It's a very hard problem that you're treating like a minor detail...

          • One-time pads are extremely cumbersome, and the "distribution system" of which you speak is inherently highly vulnerable to things like interception, whether of the high or low-tech sort.

            A lot of country's foreign departments already have a system in place for manually carrying encryption keys across the globe every month, so this is not a problem. (I don't know if a lot do that, but I know that some do it). Integrating it into VPN is just a software development problem, it's not something that couldn't be done.

            Either way, Bruce Schneier correctly points out that the encryption algorithms we use are definitely not the weak link in the system. Even with OTP you can have your pad comprom

            • Hand-wave all you want, you still won't change the reality.

              • lol that's like an elementary school argument. The reality that you think the NSA has broken the key algorithms? You're not one to be talking about reality, kiddo

                • The reality that you think the NSA has broken the key algorithms? You're not one to be talking about reality, kiddo

                  There are publicly known vulnerabilities in any crypto you care to name. Combining issues like those, with obscene amounts of money, makes it possible to decrypt anything in a reasonable time-frame. If you don't know this, you shouldn't be offering your uneducated opinion on the subject. When you're talking about *governments* and multi-billion dollar trade-secrets, the rules are very differ

                  • There are publicly known vulnerabilities in any crypto you care to name.

                    SHA-2 and SHA-3 are still good.

                    And acting like it's oh-so-very simple to manage gigabytes of OTPs every day, and feeding it into the low-level protocols never designed for such a thing, won't make it true.

                    OTP would be easy to integrate into any low level encryption. That's not the problem; the problem is making sure the pad is secure. If it gets stolen, your encryption is over. Have you seen how many algorithms openSSL already integrates, for example? You probably don't know what you are talking about. Gigabytes are easy to transfer, do you know the size of hard drives these days?

                    Also, you should go read a book about cryptography. It will make you knowledgable.

                    And let's not forget that I mentioned FOUR different things that were utterly and undeniably wrong with your ridiculous stance on this issue. Yet you haven't argued with any of the other three show-stopping issues.

                    Yeap. You're

  • Translation: (Score:3)

    by xiando ( 770382 ) on Saturday February 15, 2014 @04:14AM (#46253519) Homepage Journal
    The US government is using it's infrastructure and networks to spy on everyone so it naturally assumes that China is going this as well.
  • Whether they are insecure or not a similar thing was part of a sales tactic that Cisco used in Australia a while ago. It's called bagging the opposition. Of course it takes an extremely unethical company to take it this far, but Cisco is developing a bit of reputation along those lines. It's no longer the company the Ciscos started. It's the company that ripped off the Ciscos and then sacked them from their own company.
  • And yet, somehow, they were.

  • Huawei sux... actually... (Score:3)

    by ImOuttaHere ( 2996813 ) on Saturday February 15, 2014 @05:37AM (#46253677)

    For anyone closely following China and their state-sponsored intellectual property theft activities, this comes as no surprise. The only thing I would change in the opening paragraph is "...infrastructure could be used to spy on communications... to ...infrastructure is used to spy on communications...

    China's IP theft, how it happens, Hauwei's involvement, Chinese Liberation Army battalions devoted to network disruption and IP theft, US three letter agency involvement in trying to help US corporations protect themselves, is all open, public knowledge. Saying things like CISCO is worse is only avoiding the real and serious issues of western business competitiveness and military capabilities by posing a straw-man that, while the argument might feel good, is completely and utterly false. Do some research before claiming "we're no better than they are", please.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jovius ( 974690 )

      So how does it help when this east-west / us-them -construction is constantly strengthened and the separation thus deepened. The current paradigm needs to be changed. Adoring the ones that are selfish enough to gain power will only leave crumbles for the followers. In the end the ones that actually want to gain transparency are put into jails and opaqued - regardless of the culture and the political system, because the highest sphere shares the same view. The tribal power structure is build deep into the hu

    • The link from the other guy was not in a reply to your outrageous lies, so here it goes:
      http://www.wired.com/wiredente... [wired.com]

      Living in a surveillance state like china or the US is one thing. Denying it and accusing only the other country of being a fascistic surveillance state is ridiculous.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      I've done some research. We are no better than they are. There is proof that Cisco spied on foreign governments for the USA. Where's the proof that Huawei did the same for China? Oh, because we don't like them, we don't need no stinkin proof.
  • According to Snowden, NSA use vulnerabilities in both Huawei, Cisco and other manufacturers gear to spy on traffic but if the vulnerabilities in Cisco, Juniper and others are planted there by NSA they might suspect that other parties have bigger difficulties spying on Cisco gear. Most likely though it is more a question on wanting to favour American industry like when NSA did industrial espionage against Brazilian, German or other countries companies and share data with US companies.
  • Use American based infrastructure to make it easier for the NSA, CIA, etc., to get your data.

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