America fears that Huawei's gear could contain malicious code designed to let in Chinese spies
to think of a better reflection of the rise of China than the rise of Huawei. Like China, the firm, which was founded in 1987, began at the bottom of the value chain, reselling telephone-switching gear imported from Hong Kong. Also like China, it was not content to stay there. These days its products—from smartphones to solar panels—are sleek, high-tech and competitive with anything its rivals can produce. As a result its revenues have soared, hitting $105bn in 2018 .
Mike Pompeo, America’s secretary of state, has threatened to withhold intelligence co-operation from anyone who uses the firm’s gear in “critical” networks. Australia, like Britain one of America’s allies in the “Five Eyes” electronic-spying pact, has banned the firm explicitly. New Zealand, another member, has rebuffed a request from a local firm to use Huawei’s kit. Japan—which is not in the club, but is closely allied to America—has tightened its rules.
Britain’s stance matters more than the middling size of its telecoms market suggests. The country’s signals-intelligence agency,, is the biggest in the Five Eyes after America’s National Security Agency , with which it works hand-in-glove. And few countries know more about how Huawei operates. Britain was one of the firm’s first beachheads in the West. In 2005 Huawei was chosen by, a formerly state-owned telecoms company, to be part of a £10bn contract to modernise Britain’s phone network.
But there is more to worry about than back doors and here Britain’s findings have been less reassuring. In the’s most recent report, published in March, it suggests that the code in Huawei’s products is a buggy, spaghettified mess. That may not sound sinister. But bugs can be as useful to hackers as any back door.
, a widely used set of cryptographic protocols designed to secure data travelling over networks. Researchers frequently find security flaws in Open, meaning that sticking to the newest versions is vital. Huawei’s kit, it seems, is at risk from hackers of all kinds, not just Chinese state-sponsored ones. Insiders blame this sloppiness at least partly on the same commercial agility that has made Huawei so popular among its customers for its speedy introduction of new products.
Cyber-security, sanctions-busting and Tappy are, in turn, only parts of an argument that is fundamentally about the relationship between technology and geopolitics, says Janice Stein at the University of Toronto. America, the incumbent superpower, is under no illusions about the relationship between technology and power, of both the hard and soft sort. Neither is China, which aspires to the same status. Huawei is widely seen as a Chinese national champion.
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