3 ms·
Not huawei but I have worked with networking gear from china and other countries (cloud scale) that has similar backdoors. Basically an account where a whitelis
by badrabbit 7y ago
Not huawei but I have worked with networking gear from china and other countries (cloud scale) that has similar backdoors. Basically an account where a whitelisted ip can use to ssh to the device. It was basically a "support" account. If you have a critical problem you get on the phone with their engineers and have them help you troubleshoot with the backdoor access. Of course no one calls it a backdoor,more like a side door for support.
I suspect that's what they're talking about here. I also suspect a much more clever actual backdoor in their products. People think a backdoor is something that gives direct shell access,but in reality compromising data integrity or compromising something else so that the attacker can access it easily or a one way "back window" where the device or other devices are taken offline is also a "backdoor".
Huawei is distracting from concerns of actual backdoor. They can easily say "would you consider windows auto-updates a backdoor? How about windows remote assistance?" ,they're basically misdirecting to a defensible side door by calling it a backdoor.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y agoNot to dimimish your main point, but I do actually consider Windows Update to have some similarities to a back door. It was abused by Microsoft to push unwanted telemetry and advertisements to mostly unsuspecting users of Windows 7.
- badrabbit 7y agoSure, that does not diminish my main point at all. For public opinion "MS does it too" is enough of a defense.
- mycall 7y agoExcept all of Microsoft updates are meticulously reviewed by security teams around the world and would find any backdoors being installed, activated or manipulated.
- badrabbit 7y agoReply to the parent commenter. I never disputed that. But since you replied to me: MS never allowed external security teams to audit its auto-update infrastructure. Can they not deploy any software with auto update? Until recently,their crypto api had a bug (backdoor? Lol) that allowed forging signatures for auto updates...so.. I don't see your point. Much like huawei, the speculation is that these types of backdoors will be used in times of war or severe political tension.
- mycall 7y agoUS Government has audited Microsoft's infrastructure.
- ryanlol 7y agoWhat’s the mechanism that prevents MS from serving malicious updates to a specific subset of users?
- ryanlol 7y ago> I also suspect a much more clever actual backdoor in their products. Not sure why they’d even need that, this stuff is buggy as shit as is.