Huawei-phobia

Huawei has a lamentable record in IPR, it has a massive state-funded war-chest and yes, the weight of evidence tells us that Chinese government is orchestrating grand theft cyber.

But the proof for Huawei as a stalking horse for Chinese state espionage is remarkably thin. Zero, in fact.

The vendor has been accused in the US, India and Australia of being a major league security threat. Yet among the hundreds of networks in dozens of countries world that have installed Huawei (or ZTE) gear, not one customer and not one engineer has identified one piece of threatening code.

If they had of course the Americans would be shouting it from the Pentagon rooftop. But there is no hard evidence, just the circumstantial connection of Ren Zhengfei’s earlier career in the PLA.

This is damaging to the world’s telecom and tech industries because they have real issues with China that are ill-served by this ill-informed bluster. Like intellectual property protection, telecom market access, possible state subsidies, China’s opaque regulatory system, protectionist procurement policies and of course cyber-security.

I mention all this having come across this piece of deranged bombast about Huawei and ZTE that shows how deep Huaweiphobia now runs.

The story claims that Huawei and ZTE have built vulnerabilities that give the Chinese government “pervasive access” to around 80% of the world’s communications.

Yep, every single network sold by those companies allows China to:

 …undertake remote industrial espionage and even sabotage electronically of critical infrastructures in the United States and in other industrialized countries.

 With this access, the sources say, the Chinese are working on the other 20%. The two companies give the Chinese remote electronic “backdoor” access through the equipment they have installed in telecommunications networks in 140 countries.

This same well-informed author goes on to explain that Huawei invented Deep Packet Inspection technology and that VPN means “very private network”. Enough!

To the extent there is any rationale behind the US and Australian bans on Huawei, I'm guessing it is as a lever against China over cyber-attacks. But the fact that the UK  has no problem in allowing BT to buy Huawei tells us that not all of Washington’s good friends are on-board.

What we do know for a fact about Huawei and ZTE is that they are money-making ventures, and most of that money is being made abroad.  The risk to their entire business of being caught putting security holes into customers’ networks is so large as to make this fevered scenario laughably implausible.