Well, the Chinese gvmnt has a great amount of influence over those companies (ZTE, Huawei, etc) and they have been accused of using that influence to get them to release user-specific info.
The US Gvmnt is very scared of that, of course.
Srpint being "owned" by one of them might mean that the Chinese Gvmnt could do the same. And Sprint does a LOT of work for the USG.
Ibeno, all such things may happens when competition becomes tighter. Normally Chinese companies are looking others with a different eye. Since both countries are technologically rivals and keen to know the internal happenings of others, this is one of the advance ways of spying. Regularly it will monitor the statics and send periodic reports to the intentor.
while considering the national security, especially after reports of global network of Chinese hackers breaking into sensitive installations worldwide, includes the military and telecom networks. It further cites recent UK reports that have raised concerns over importing a Chinese telecom major’s equipment for use in Britain’s telecom network, which may lead to espionage or a shut down during a war. Govt. hopes this will ward off the rising threat of espionage into strategic segments and more over government is also concerned about future availability of foreign chip technologies.
There's never been a case in the past decade of these companies of ever committing any crime. It is interesting that Indian companies like Tata's IT group have began to partner with these Chinese companies to get contracts in other countries so there has been a growing mutual benefit.
I've read a lot of articles about how the Chinese telecom vendors are not trust-worthy but what can companies do? Huawei, ZTE and others are becoming the biggest telecom vendors, can a company afford to skip on their products and services?
You are actually completely free to put in any security you want... on two conditions:
1. The 'magic' box MUST bridge the internet to your private network at a position where it can see the internal user traffic and can be accessed by the public security department.
2. You cannot add in a sandbox/protection to prevent the device from performing the function it was intended for.(see linked article)
You can get a fairly shrewed Idea from the legal analysis here:
Read around about article 13, I have the full chinese article on another computer system, along with some pictures of the equipment and a list of 'authorized' equipment suppliers.
If it were my choice I would not allow any sort of this supplied telecom infrastructure anywhere near a counties digital backbone, especially as this level of equipment usually contains multiple FPGA's, and with the FPGA you CANNOT analyze its functionality or de-cript the programming functions. It is why the FPGA device is so often used in Military applications or places where high security protection of designs are required, even with the binary file of an FPGA you cannot de-compile it into any sort of meaningful structure to allow analysis, basically it is the original Black-box, even more of a problem , is that the FPGA device is completely re-programable over any communication medium it may implement, as such its functionality can be re-targeted at any time with very little chance of detection.
Stochastic excursion, you are right. They may always open the option for data mining and monitoring, more over many of times government is not much bothered about such thinks because of lack of knowledge, non sensitivity and ignorance. But when it comes to national security and military forefront, government is much concerned, especially after wiki leaks incidents. China has always an eye over the happenings and developments in neighborhood countries, especially over India due to various reasons.
Dave, many times vendors provides choices for security measurements. But these Chinese equipments are coming with inbuilt dynamic data collection & monitoring software, irrespective of any safe guard measurements from the user side. More over the vendors are putting some restrictions for installing user software as a part of warranty. Since most of the telecom equipments are online in 24x7, they can tap the traffic data’s at any point of time through some simple codes. As of now government have a plan to restrict or limit the use of Chinese equipments.
Reports suggest China keeps its options open when it comes to data harvesting from networks it is interested in monitoring. The unauthorized access into Google's networks during that company's stay in China could not explicitly be declared as government policy, and so was surreptitious. OTOH as long as the access is official policy they are free to be heavy-handed about it.
Certain non-sensitive traffic the Indian government probably doesn't mind the Chinese snooping into. Indeed like some countries they may even pay China for the intelligence they've collected on their own people.
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