I've been following Huawei very closely for the past few years and I have a few corrections. One will seem to defend Huawei, the second will serve to attack them.

 

The following statement is incorrect: "But in the West there is fear that the Chinese Internet hardware producers, because they have close ties with the Chinese military...".  True, there is fear, but Huawei does not have close ties with the military.   Granted, they do supply telecommunications equipment to the PLA, that is standard, just as Cisco supplies equipment to the US military and the military from other countries.  Several high visibility people have cited the founder was a retired General in the PLA, which is not true, he was an engineer and left to start his own corporation, he didn't retire and he was not a General - so that connection is not valid.  There is a woman on the board with close ties to the intelligence community in China, but that does not establish "close" connections between Huawei and the PLA.  Almost every board of a major corporation has a retired member of the defense establishment on its board.  

 

Huawei equipment has been scrutinized for backdoors, malicious embedded code and other means of establishing surreptitious entry through their equipment.  The customer retains the right to upgrade or not, they have control.  What the customer usually does not have is the capability of fully testing any upgrades received by Huawei, which may or may not include a 'backdoor'.  At any time of their choosing, software updates can easily insert and then delete backdoors, and it might be difficult, if not impossible, to detect.  All telecommunications equipment containing upgradable software has this vulnerability, it is standard. 

 

I and others have been warning of this and other foreign supplied equipment for years.  The US government established the Trusted Foundry program to protect sensitive DoD programs only, but the rest of us must rely on independent testing to discover any other security problems.  There is no established program, it is very, very expensive and to date "hope" is our only protection. 

Internet technologies are a double-edge sword, and we can never assume that any network is totally secure.  Maybe the Department of Defense should buy Research in Motion and it's Blackberry platform and then set about hardening the network as much as possible, eh?

 

 

 

Oh, and I have a Huawei smartphone - $55 per month from Cricket.  I'm overall pleased with it except for it's voracious battery appetite.  But I don't trust it's maker in any strategic sense...