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Huawei 5G now banned in Britain
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peter-h:
According to the UK GCHQ the Huawei products are fundamentally insecure, due to buggy software.

They don't need back doors. They have front doors :)

All Chinese kit is buggy as hell. Huawei is of similar quality to Draytek which is the top of Chinese stuff and yet whole sections in the functionality just don't work. I've been using these boxes for 10-15 years.

So why did the UK networks install this stuff? Because it's cheap. Cisco kit is 10x the price, the cheap Cisco kit is junk (rebadged Chinese boxes) and the judgement is made that if the box does its job it is OK. Most data flowing over the cellular networks is encrypted (https) so everybody is happy... except that traffic analysis is still possible and very useful to a State-level enemy.

One doesn't need to worry about Chinese snooping on the traffic. They probably aren't, routinely, because it would have been discovered by now, in scenarios where somebody is having to debug something and is monitoring packets. These things have been discovered many times in the past e.g. PC or phone software sending data back to the Church of Apple or Google. But the Chinese probably can, and very likely can remotely shut the boxes down so they need a physical reboot (power cycle) but then the packet used to shut them down can be re-sent. I have a Draytek 2955 router which reboots several times a day, upon receiving some funny packet. I also used to have a Nokia 808 phone which (this was well known) would be locked-up by a rare 3G/HSPA packet (the fix was to disable HSPA). So plenty of examples.

It is a pity the UK installed this garbage in the first place but the networks are private companies and when spending millions, the cost is important.

Also we don't need 5G anyway. The UK doesn't even have a decent 4G coverage; most of the countryside doesn't have it. What is 5G actually needed for? The stuff coming out of China now about "bad news for all UK mobile phone owners" is totally disingenuous trash.
Simon:
The problem is that companies only look at the bottom line and keeping share holders happy and if buying cheap does not keep the share price up they will resort to fiddling the books. After all standards like those granted under a CE mark exist simply to protect the consumer from too much bottom line watching.

Clear example, Grenfel tower has substandard panels installed that were not fire proof, how much did they save? a mere £5k which was relatively small money to the cost of the project but that was £5K in the refurbishes pocket.
2N3055:
USA's biggest problem is not Chinese spying, but the fact that THEY ARE NOT.
Only vendors so far caught with spyware were Cisco (with NSA spyware loaded) shipped to Russia....
They figured Russians are stupid and that they won't check..

How else will they spy on Angela Merkel if they don't control the network...?
Simon:
Both sides have been playing that game for years. Remember the Gift given to a US president by Russian school children that was a very clever radio transmitter with no actual electronic components,
peter-h:
But who cares if the US can monitor the traffic? There is no conceivable scenario where the US will be our enemy, in the military sense.

Every country with signals monitoring capability (most modern countries) is monitoring everybody else's traffic. Well, there is a treaty (UKUSA?) blocking those two doing it to each other but who would be quite sure?

What we really do not want is China being able to remotely shut stuff down.

Also developing these boxes is not rocket science. It all starts with a copy of Linux, a load of open source software, and some purpose written stuff.
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