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Yes, the risk is real. Imagine the US made phones for Russia during the Cold War, and the phones were so complicated and full of microcontrollers that reverse e
by TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
Yes, the risk is real. Imagine the US made phones for Russia during the Cold War, and the phones were so complicated and full of microcontrollers that reverse engineering and ensuring that a backdoor wasn't in place was impossible. Do you really think the US wouldn't have taken advantage of that?
The specific technical risk is unknown, though. There are thousands of microcontrollers in a modern advanced electronic device. It's nearly impossible to inspect each one and see what exactly is backdoored and how.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThe phones have access to the raw data. The towers shouldn't have access to the raw data, because presumably it's encrypted. If it isn't, it's game over anyways. Not really comparable. You could make an argument about metadata, which is much more questionable from the get-go.
- filoleg 6y agoI think the parent comment wasn't talking about intercepting traffic and being able to know what your enemy is talking about. The parent comment was talking about being able to take advantage of the situation by making the enemy use your devices and then incapacitating their infrastructure at the perfect moment by activating the killswitch on those devices.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThe solution for that isn't to boycott Huawei, it's to have multiple networks with many providers. A country using Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei is much better protected to such an attack than a company using only Nokia or only Huawei or only Ericsson, or both Nokia and Ericsson but not Huawei.
- filoleg 6y agoSure, I am not arguing one way or another regarding whether this ban is good or not. I am just saying that the cold war analogy had nothing to do with encryption, unlike what the post I am replying to is attempting to imply.