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Trump declares emergency over IT threats

bbc.co.uk

21–30 of 30 posts

Re: Trump declares emergency over IT threats

#21
post #5

Who's gonna build real 5G in the US?

I'd like to know this too. Presumably both Ericsson and Nokia are also foreign telecoms companies, so who does that leave?

Samsung is Korean, Alcatel-Lucent was French but now is part of Nokia. Nortel was acquired by Ericsson.

Cisco makes some backbone equipment. They were trying hard to sell a LTE "virtualized" core when I previously worked at $wireless_telco, but cisco does not make RAN components.

The only US based company I know of that is has licensed products in production use by a major telcom is Airspan [1]

[1] https://www.airspan.com/

Re: Trump declares emergency over IT threats

#22
post #7

This is great news. The lack of the government seeming to care about national IT security has been bothering me for years now.

Are you sure it's about national IT security, and not just about sticking it to China because we're in a trade war with them?

Huawei has set a historical precedent of being a bad actor in regards to corporate espionage. How outlandish is it to think that they would also be participating in national espionage for the Chinese government?

Re: Trump declares emergency over IT threats

#24
post #5

Who's gonna build real 5G in the US?

I'd like to know this too. Presumably both Ericsson and Nokia are also foreign telecoms companies, so who does that leave?

Just to be clear, since the article isn't: the EO does not ban products from all foreign companies, only foreign companies who "poses an undue risk of sabotage to or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and communications technology or services in the United States" (Direct quote from EO).

So Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, etc. will not be affected.

Re: Trump declares emergency over IT threats

#25
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to know this too. Presumably both Ericsson and Nokia are also foreign telecoms companies, so who does that leave?

Just to be clear, since the article isn't: the EO does not ban products from all foreign companies, only foreign companies who "poses an undue risk of sabotage to or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and communications technology or services in the United States" (Direct quote from EO). So Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, etc.…

Ahh OK thanks for clarifying that. So by 'foreign' they really mean 'Chinese', and it becomes a little less crazy.

Re: Trump declares emergency over IT threats

#26
post #7

This is great news. The lack of the government seeming to care about national IT security has been bothering me for years now.

Are you sure it's about national IT security, and not just about sticking it to China because we're in a trade war with them?

How sure are you of a framing which separates information security from economic conflict?

Re: Trump declares emergency over IT threats

#27

> The president signed an executive order effectively barring US companies from using foreign telecoms believed to pose a security risk to the country. So let's just back up a little: A Chinese equipment manufacturer left a telnet daemon running on a single version of a single device and a national emergency is declared, Cisco leaves SSH credentials (public and private keys leaked) hard coded into multiple generation…

I've repeatedly seen a lack of interest in geopolitical issues on HN. This whole thing is akin to "Should the US be reliant on a hardware manufacturer that can be considered a non-independent subsidiary of the Chinese government?" Replace Chinese with Russian, Iranian, North Korean, Saudi Arabian, etc. These are all countries, like China, that would love to have that kind of potential leverage and power over US infra…

If the U.S. were serious about any of this they'd be funding initiatives for open, verified hardware and software. Other than INRIA, the French research group, and CSIRO, from where seL4 comes, where else is this work being done?

I don't just mean theoretical work. I mean production ready stuff that is useable, like most commercialized solutions are, but also actually secure. Doing both is difficult. seL4 is useable and in fact is being tested in U.S. drones. Why didn't the NSA do something like seL4? Instead we get seLinux which isn't even secure--anything running on Linux is as a practical matter exploitable on the first day it ships.

Our communications and control systems are so fundamentally insecure it hardly matters whether it's sourced from Huawei or not--it's six of one or a half-dozen of the other, except one of those cartons is at least substantially cheaper than the other.

The fact of the matter is that the commercial industry will never develop and deliver secure products on their own. They've never done this well, and are probably fundamentally incapable of doing so because most of the benefits of a secure product inure to the public generally. Commercial vendors can't capture the value provided by secure solutions. It's up to the public--government, academia, open source community, etc--to invest in and develop the fundamental building blocks of secure systems.

Importantly, the entire stack doesn't need to be secure. We can write secure networked systems for the Internet because we presume the network is hostile. There's no reason that cellular radios should be a trusted component of a wireless cellular network. They are because (1) it's just cheaper to do it that way (see above) and (2) the U.S. government spent decades sabotaging cryptography generally and cellular standards specifically, which means even 5G standards are fundamentally broken from a design perspective.

So the whole Huawei controversy deserves a giant eye roll. All of the arguments about why Huawei can't be trusted are irrelevant. Huawei shouldn't be trusted, but neither should Qualcomm or any of these other vendors. Rather, we should set transparency standards and verify that they're being met. But doing so requires a ridiculous amount of work up and down the software and hardware stack, starting from the design stage; work that the U.S. government isn't actually doing but, in fact, still sabotaging!

Re: Trump declares emergency over IT threats

#29
post #22
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure it's about national IT security, and not just about sticking it to China because we're in a trade war with them?

Huawei has set a historical precedent of being a bad actor in regards to corporate espionage. How outlandish is it to think that they would also be participating in national espionage for the Chinese government?

Can you point to a specific example? Why was banning not done via the standard arbitrage?
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