Security News > 2020 > February > Friday Squid Blogging: Squids Are as Intelligent as Dogs

The NSA/CIA have got away with it with other telco switches around the world for quite some time now but the manufacturers of those switches are not subject to "Oversight" in the way Huawei have voluntarily done with the UK's GCHQ. Thus as the "Greek Olympic tragedy" made a glaring security hole obvious Huawei will have taken steps to close it, much to the anoyance of the US NSA and CIA, because Huawei switches have measures in place that make the loading of illicit software onto their switches very much more difficult, not impossible but "Implausible" and almost certainly discovered and reported automatically to the switch operators as it would be flagged up in several ways.

Because Huawei are putting their international reputation on the line with alowing GCHQ to look at their code, they are going to be way more carefull than other Telco equipment supliers not subject to oversight will be.

Have a thing about what that means in terms of "Mechanism" and why it migh realy upset the likes of the NSA&CIA Which brings me onto the "GCHQ cheating" the agrement Huawei had with GCHQ was not just for code review and security analysis, but also to train GCHQ staff not staff of foreign nations or alow foreign nations to see Huawei code.

So whilst Huawei have not been writing "Back door" or "Remote accces" code for their switches, a point they have quite rightly made a lot of noise about, we can say that the UK GCHQ and US NSA SigInt agencies at the very least have had a front row seat on the code review process.

Because any allegation you make against Huawei applys way way more to all the other Telco equipment suppliers, many of whom have been caught out with dodgy software practices like Ericsson did over the Greek Olympics.

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/friday_squid_bl_716.html