Huawei and communications security

[think2]

Australia and the U.S. have banned Chinese company Huawei from installing internet backbone stuff (or something) in their country due to concerns that Huawei is controlled by the Chinese govt/ spy agencies and the fact that some cyber attacks are suspected as being driven by the Chinese govt. Apparently the U.S. and other countries do this too.

What is the danger that Huawei pose?

Can they make internet routers or whatever that snoop on messages and copy them off to some remote computer that analyses them? Could the remote computer then pick out say, email traffic and look for messages from say, politicians or weapons manufacturers and learn sensitive information?

So if that's the case, why don't companies encode their email traffic so that it can't be understood by the wrong people?

 

[Gryz]

Governments don't like encryption. Because it will prohibit them from eavesdropping on their own citizens too. I think this is true for all countries.

20 Years ago, when a lot of protocols were being developed, it wasn't feasible to encrypt everything. CPU of endstations just weren't fast enough to do it. Nowadays, strong encryption isn't really expensive anymore. I am surprised (and disappointed) myself that not everything is encrypted these days. So many technology improvements in the last decades. But encryption (and security, and privacy) seem to not have evolved at all. Actually going backwards.


About Huawei. Everything I heard about the company, I don't like. But as long as there is no firm proof about Huawei being a liability, the US government just needs to learn to deal with the fact that not all high-tech technology comes from US soil anymore.

Btw, I don't think eavesdropping is the big problem. I think the fear is that the Internet is now a very important piece of infrastructure. And you might not want to let the stability/robustness of it depend on technology/companies you don't trust.