3 ms·
A minor point of curiosity: one of the captions says "Using SilentCircle on a Huawei complete negates the point of using SilentCircle." I appreciate that it ma
by daxelrod 14y ago
A minor point of curiosity: one of the captions says "Using SilentCircle on a Huawei complete negates the point of using SilentCircle."
I appreciate that it may be somewhat tongue in cheek, but is that a riff on the US accusing Huawei of being a national security threat[0], or do Huawei phones have a track record of known security vulnerabilities?
[0]http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/us/us-panel-calls-huawei-and-zte-national-security-threat.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/us/us-panel-calls-huawei-a...
- rdtsc 14y agoAt some point it is hard to say a system is secure if you cannot control the hardware. That is when secure systems are certified it is not just a software library, it has to be full hardware + software solution. If anything can insert itself in between boot and loading the OS then it could read the memory and just scan the memory for a key (by say emulating the memory inside a VM). A phone manufacturer could very simply add a hardware memory read access via a separate chip to their phone memory. The phone then could boot to an arbitrarily 'secure' OS and application but it would still be a all for naught as key could still be read from the memory. Now there are these things : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module that should help with the issue but I am not sure if there are any phones that ship with them.
- AnthonyMouse 14y agoHow would a TPM do anything against malicious hardware? The hardware manufacturer could just as easily include a malicious TPM.
- jsnell 14y agoWell, it's not just that one US incident, the level of paranoia regarding Huawei is much wider than that. For example IIRC the UK blocked a Huawei bid to provide cell phone service during the olympics. I'm not sure why exactly they have such a shitty reputation compared to other Chinese companies. For example, has anyone every said that running ssh on a ThinkPad completely negates the point? But the reputation is there, which is what makes it a decent joke. (And yes, I chuckled at the image before reading the caption.)
- peripetylabs 14y agoI don't know about Huawei, but backdoors were discovered in some ZTE phones: http://www.zdnet.com/backdoor-found-in-zte-android-phones-1339337887/ http://www.zdnet.com/backdoor-found-in-zte-android-phones-13...