The U.K. government set up a joint organization between its signal intelligence organization, GCHQ, and Huawei to see if they could reach a workable level of trust in Huawei’s equipment. Their latest report suggests this has proven impossible. Even if a switch could be proven to be harmless, all switches must be able to update their software, usually over the internet itself; something that’s innocuous today can readily turn into a vulnerability tomorrow.
In this context, Huawei’s repeated claim that no Trojan Horse has been found in its systems is meaningless. Australia, the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, Poland and the Czech Republic have concluded that Huawei parts put their next-generation communications infrastructure at risk.
On the one hand, there will be a cost to banning Huawei equipment: less competition, higher prices and perhaps a slower build-out of 5G infrastructure. Deutsche Telekom has not raised objections to Huawei — even though one of the U.S. indictments is for alleged Huawei espionage of Deutsche Telecom’s U.S. subsidiary — and two of Canada’s three large telcos are lobbying aggressively against a ban. Along with the regulatory chill from its 2012 foreign investor protection agreement with China, that explains why Canada has been tepid about cyber defence and readiness measures that impose limits on equipment and service providers.
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