Re:U.S. to open program to replace Huawei equipment in U.S. ...
by kube-system on Monday September 27, 2021 @06:03PM
(#28676595)
> Even if we assume that all Huawei products are currently backdoored, the security of commercial IT products is so bad that they pose no impediment to any organization more talented than a group of script kiddies.
The primary issue that the USG has with Huawei equipment is not technical security. It’s trust and governance.
I’ll give you a really simplistic hypothetical example: Let’s say a Cisco and a Huawei box have the same exact vulnerability, and the US and China engage in an all-out cyber war. China can simply block Huawei’s support staff with sanctions. They don’t need a back door. Meanwhile the Cisco tech is already patching the Cisco box. Equal technology, unequal results.
Not all issues regarding technology are about purely technical issues. Technology has to be implemented, maintained, patched, supported, etc. Those are primarily concerns of trust.
Even if we assume that all Huawei products are currently backdoored, the security of commercial IT products is so bad that they pose no impediment to any organization more talented than a group of script kiddies. A complete replacement of all Huawei equipment does not in any way materially improve security of the network against a competent nation state attacker. At most it might cause their operational budget to increase by 0.1% to fund exploit development of the replacement equipment on the off chance that they are utterly incompetent and do not already have a hoard of hundreds of exploits in all existing systems like the CIA did as revealed in the Vault 7 hack.
A material increase in security would require switching from Huawei to systems around 1000x better than prevailing systems otherwise you should have exactly zero trust that the security of the network can even minimally impede an adversary like China.