Britain Commits $333 Million To Help Carriers Replace Huawei 5G (scmp.com) 56
Britain will spend $333 million to diversify its sources of 5G wireless equipment after banning China's Huawei from supplying the next-generation technology. From a report: Huawei is set to be excluded from British 5G networks by 2027 due to security concerns, leaving phone carriers reliant on a supply duopoly of Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson. Around $67 million of the total will be spent next year to help build "a secure and resilient 5G network" according to documents published on Wednesday as part of Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak's spending review. The resulting reduction in competition could hurt security and push up prices, so Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden has started a task force to increase the number of suppliers. He is set to publish more details before the end of the year.
Britain's crackdown on Huawei came in July after UK officials said US sanctions made it impossible to verify the security of Huawei's supply chain. The White House accuses Huawei of being a security risk, which the company has always denied. Since then, Nokia and Ericsson have already won major contracts from British carriers like BT Group and CK Hutchison Holdings' Three UK. The phone industry is banking that longer-term initiatives such as OpenRAN -- a project to make mobile network equipment more interoperable and encourage new suppliers -- will eventually introduce more competition.
Britain's crackdown on Huawei came in July after UK officials said US sanctions made it impossible to verify the security of Huawei's supply chain. The White House accuses Huawei of being a security risk, which the company has always denied. Since then, Nokia and Ericsson have already won major contracts from British carriers like BT Group and CK Hutchison Holdings' Three UK. The phone industry is banking that longer-term initiatives such as OpenRAN -- a project to make mobile network equipment more interoperable and encourage new suppliers -- will eventually introduce more competition.
The UK is The US'es Bitches (Score:5, Funny)
Send back that Chinese back-doored hardware for some good ol American back-doored hardware probably also made in China. Wheee
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Except the hardware they're buying instead comes from sweden and finland...
Re:The UK is The US'es Bitches (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but the chips in the hardware, like most hardware tend to come from the US, China Malaysia or Taiwan. I'll be interested to see to what extent they avoid China in the new supply chains.
Re:The UK is The US'es Bitches (Score:5, Interesting)
Except the hardware they're buying instead comes from sweden and finland...
The country of origin doesn't mean anything anymore because the intelligent services have also discovered globalization.
Something that comes from Switzerland should be safe, right?
Read the tale of Crypto AG [wikipedia.org]:
Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security. It was secretly jointly owned by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) from 1970 until about 1993, with the CIA continuing as sole owner until about 2018.[1] With headquarters in Steinhausen, the company was a long-established manufacturer of encryption machines and a wide variety of cipher devices.
Oops.
Iran was a big customer. They were not very pleased when they learned that the machines were built comprimised.
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Re:The UK is The US'es Bitches (Score:5, Informative)
UK invested for 13 years (since 2007) in auditing, reviewing and testing Huawei kit. I personally doubt the effectiveness of this exercise, but the investment was done none the less.
Over the course of these 13 years the overall investment in using Huawei and mitigating its issues has been in billions, if not tens of billions.
This is now a write-off.
So the 333M, the extra costs, etc do not account for anything like 10% of the bill. The bill is horrifyingly big. Just what the country needs prior to the E.L.E. on 1st of January.
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So the 333M, the extra costs, etc do not account for anything like 10% of the bill. The bill is horrifyingly big. Just what the country needs prior to the E.L.E. on 1st of January.
You'd hope it's a lesson for people who try to base strategic infrastructure around equipment coming from an authoritarian regime. Unfortunately I expect the only lesson they will learn is that the taxpayer pays for all their mistakes. There are plenty of people at AT&T, Alcatel, Nortel and Siemens who might still have jobs if these companies thought about anything more than short term costs.
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The US spies on us and is known to install backdoors in US products.
The French spy on us and are known to install backdoors in French products.
Germany... Hmm well as far as we know they aren't actively working to undermine our security but Siemens don't only do industrial 5G products, not cellular or consumer hardware.
Maybe Japanese companies? Oh wait they have been using Huawei gear for their own roll out.
Turns out the only way to win this one is to design your network based on not trusting anyone.
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"Turns out the only way to win this one is to design your network based on not trusting anyone."
Essentially correct.
All the software must be open source and tivoization-free.
All the hardware must be open and verified.
If anything else is true, you're setting yourself up to be someone's bitch.
Any nation which can't keep their shit together sufficiently to have their own solutions has to assume they're being spied upon. Anything else is wishful thinking.
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I agree with your final conclusion. The fundamental conclusion in designing trusted computer systems is that they are trusted - in other words systems "whose failure would break a security policy" [wikipedia.org]. There have been a bunch of different interesting DARPA research project proposals around building trusted systems on top of untrusted components - which should be a hint that this is not something that anybody knows how to do right now.
There is very specific experience with the problems that not being able to b
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But the masters in the US will be happy with little Boris and throw him a bone. Unless, of course, with the administration change in January everything reverts back to how it was before 2016.
Re:The UK is The US'es Bitches (Score:5, Insightful)
Huawei is the only major supplier that shares its source code and detailed information on its hardware with external auditors. They started doing it after the US attacks began to prove that their systems were not backdoored.
So we can actually verify that Huawei firmware does not have backdoors and that the shipped hardware matches the verified designs we have seen.
Switching to anyone else is a major security downgrade. It will make some Tory donor richer though.
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It will make some Tory donor richer though.
Don't be silly, it has nothing to do with donors and everything to do with a panicked appeal to the USA to help them with a trade deal after they realised the colossal stupidity of Brexit and how they infact they not only don't hold all the cards, but suddenly realised they are the only country without any aces.
Easiest trade deals in history, countries lining up to make deals with the UK, all turned into... 2 trade deals with countries worse than those afforded to the EU by the same countries, and a whole l
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What? (Score:1)
> US sanctions made it impossible to verify the security of Huawei's supply chain
It's the fault of the sanctions!
Re: What? (Score:1)
Let's be honest (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, US tech will have built-in back doors, and there's no reason to trust Uncle Sam's altruism. But the Chinese regime is busy building a truly terrifying Big Brother surveillance state on a scale the world has never seen.
There is zero chance their equipment won't spend most of its time working to tighten its grip on its people, and it is equally futile to believe China won't leverage access to First World infrastructure to extend its power and control across the globe. The US has already reached its high water mark for exerting control over allies and enemies. China is just starting out, and it will crush any nation that comes under its control as brutally and efficiently as it is currently crushing Hong Kong. Also unlike the US, China takes the long view. By the time countries using Chinese tech for infrastructure understand there's a problem, it will be far too late to do anything about it.
Re:Let's be honest (Score:5, Insightful)
the Chinese regime is busy building a truly terrifying Big Brother surveillance state on a scale the world has never seen.
The US has already reached its high water mark for exerting control over allies and enemies
I'm just wondering why do you think these are that much different in this regard. they are the sole two powers competing against each other in this "market", they have shown dedication to win this race, and will easily borrow tricks from each other's book, as they have done multiple times in the past. I believe by this time US has well realized how much of a threat their lack of control over communication hardware production presents, so they are on their way to chip production independency from China. (Which makes me wonder if Russia is firmly inside China's hands in this regard, or is planning to do something about it as well.)
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> I'm just wondering why do you think these are that much different in this regard.
It's very simple. Spend some time in each country and pick your favorite flavor.
Re:Let's be honest (Score:4, Insightful)
>I'm just wondering why do you think these are that much different in this regard.
Because their cultures are fundamentally different at their core tenets. Ranging from who commands the highest value (US thinks children, China thinks parents) to how to think (US prefers individuality, China harshly enforces collective) to what is the thing most important to have (US thinks value, China thinks respect), these cultures are fundamentally different in many irreconcilable ways.
And we have already seen US at its worst, when it commanded absolute military superiority over the world for many decades. We have seen China just beginning to rise to the same level, and we already see mass genocide, suppression of thought and militarist expansionism being practised as a norm.
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Thank you for that. I couldn't have said it as well.
Re:Let's be honest (Score:4)
But the Chinese regime is busy building a truly terrifying Big Brother surveillance state on a scale the world has never seen.
Yep, and they have used and are using the "expertise" of a bunch US companies to do that. Which means that guess who is farther ahead in the Big Brother surveillance nation-building.
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Let's not also forget that per Chinese law, all Chinese companies are required to have at least one CCP member on their executive team. Even if their devices are designed secure, the commingling of the party with a company selling communication infrastructure is a risk no country should accept.
They gain market share by selling at a loss until there's no other market participants. No company in a market based economies can compete.
Re: Let's be honest (Score:2)
It is called éå"ãYou're forgiven if you know nothing about how things work in China but don't let your delusion affect others.
https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh-... [wikipedia.org]å...så"
look it up and translate if you cannot read Chinese.
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It's far more invasive than that. Any large Chinese corporation must have an entire political division within it that is made of CCP members. This division is completely separate from normal operational structure of the company, and has full executive control should it find it necessary for political reasons. Down to unseating CEO if it sees fit.
All while none of the normal corporate structures within the company have any authority over this division. Because it's there as an arm of CCP's political control,
Re: Let's be honest (Score:1)
CCP also has a division called çèï¼OE"Internet Army", specialised in influencing internet discussions. They receive RMB $0.5 per message posted.
You sound like a member, but you need to work harder to get the pay.
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Not clear how a 5G router in the UK made by Huawei is tightening the Chinese government's grip on its own people. And in fact all the evidence is that the Chinese government is relaxing its grip in most of China, slowly liberalising the country and the economy.
Yes they are oppressing the Uyghurs. No excusing that. But at the same time there are bikini poll parties in western China and today LGBTQ orgs in Guangzhou are calling for gay couples to list themselves as couples and not flatmates on the census. As
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Not clear how a 5G router in the UK made by Huawei is tightening the Chinese government's grip on its own people. And in fact all the evidence is that the Chinese government is relaxing its grip in most of China, slowly liberalising the country and the economy.
Dissident groups in all countries are supported by their friends and family abroad. The Chinese government has a history of, for example, threatening and imprisoning family in China for the actions of dissidents abroad. If China has records of what everybody is doing in the west they can use this to ensure that they are effective in their oppression at home and allows them to spread that oppression to China linked groups abroad.
Don't get me wrong, the US, as the worlds biggest polluter, with a history of
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Hmm, but this requires that China can remotely activate data capture in Western networks and somehow exfiltrate it without anyone noticing. Given that these are routers that means some heavy deep packet inspection, and even then it will mostly just result in encrypted data that is designed to be resilient to Western intelligence.
And that's assuming they can even hide the capability in the first place. Huawei allows foreign governments to inspect its source code and hardware designs, and the UK has invested
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If you'd seen how Chinese government thugs operating in Canada threaten and intimidate some their students living here (and the families providing homes for them), you might be less sanguine about this.
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There is zero chance their equipment won't spend most of its time working to tighten its grip on its people
There's a far higher chance of that than the USA considering the equipment in question has had its complete source code opened up for analysis by governments which have so far found nada.
But I'm sure you're smarter than the UK's own security services who gave Huawei a clean bill of health (right before being overruled to appease Trump since the UK is so desperate for a trade deal with the USA).
Excluded by 2027 for security concerns? (Score:2)
Paranoia is expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
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Except no. Do some Googling. You'll find mainstream coverage of the "Huawei scare" going back at least two decades. Trump's only accomplishment here is making you think that he is the anti-China candidate.
Re:Paranoia is expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Huawei fully complied with such requests, and also no specific malicious security flaw has ever been detected in their stuff. Some of the code is old and/or lifted from western competitors like Nortel way back, and full of security vulnerabilities because of general s/w age and carelessness, but there would have been full transparency in the repair of those flaws, and every interest of Huawei to get the vulnerabilities patched, for business reasons.
So the remaining rationale to ban them was entirely political, and only gained momentum under the Trump administration, which then forced the other 5 eyes countries to comply.
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Except no. Do some Googling. You'll find mainstream coverage of the "Huawei scare" going back at least two decades.
Yeah so if I go out and commit a hate crime on someone is "do some Googling there are cases of racism" some kind of defense? The "Huawei scare" has been all noise. Every audit came up fine, countries properly qualified them as a vendor, even the UK's and USA's intelligence agencies gave Huawei a clean bill of health, coincidentally right until Trump came into office swinging his OMG CHINA dick around.
Re:Paranoia is expensive (Score:4)
And this is just the Tory government giving more money to their pals. It's a chumocracy, some friend of a Tory will get some lucrative contract to supply "safe" equipment paid for with taxpayer money, most likely someone who set up a PPE supplier 3 weeks ago and thinks 5G gives you cooties.
The Average (Score:1)
Corporate power? Isn't it inevitable?
Re: The Average (Score:1)
So the GCHQ can keep whoring off data to the NSA. (Score:3)
Yay! True heroes and representatives of the people!
due to security concerns.. (Score:4, Interesting)
..Due to political pressure from the US, who want their companies to dominate the market despite being uncompetitive against Chinese companies.
What about Huawei and other Chinese companies? (Score:2)
> The phone industry is banking that longer-term initiatives such as OpenRAN -- a project to make mobile network equipment more interoperable and encourage new suppliers -- will eventually introduce more competition.
Does this initiative also unfairly exclude Chinese companies?