Huawei CEO Dismisses Security, Spying Concerns

Company founder denies that Huawei employees would ever be forced to spy for China.

The founder and CEO of Chinese networking equipment manufacturer Huawei, in his first-ever media interview, Thursday dismissed allegations that backdoors may have been built into the companys products to facilitate Chinese espionage.
Huawei has no connection to the cybersecurity issues the U.S. has encountered in the past, current and future, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei, 68, told local reporters -- through an interpreter -- while on a visit to New Zealand this week, according to news reports.
Since founding the company 26 years ago, Ren had previously refused to conduct media interviews. But during his visit this week to New Zealand, he
agreed to meet
with reporters from four of the countrys news outlets.
In response to reporters questions,
Ren dismissed allegations
that his employees might be colluding with state security services, instead likening the relationship between his company and the Chinese government to that between New Zealand companies and their government, reported Fairfax Media in New Zealand. Furthermore, he said he was confident that his employees would be free to refuse any request from a Chinese intelligence service to spy on a foreign entity.
[ U.S. officials are trying to ratchet up pressure on China. See
Senate Bill Calls For Cyberespionage Watch List
. ]
Rens comments can be read as a criticism of the U.S. singling out Chinese firms Huawei (the worlds second-largest telecommunications manufacturer) and ZTE last year in a Congressional report warning that the two companies cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems. Accordingly, the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligences Oct. 2012 report
strongly encouraged all U.S. businesses
to seek other vendors for their projects.
American businesses appear to be listening. A recent survey of 454 IT professionals conducted by
InformationWeek
found that the U.S. governments recommendation to avoid Huawei equipment would influence their buying decision-making. Indeed, 37% of surveyed businesses cited the warning as a major concern, and 34% said it would be a deal-breaker.
But Ren Thursday downplayed his companys presence in the American market. Huawei equipment is almost non-existent in networks currently running in the U.S. We have never sold any key equipment to major U.S. carriers, nor have we sold any equipment to any U.S. government agency, he said.
His comments echoed those of Huawei executive VP Eric Hu, who last month said, We are not interested in the U.S. market any more,
according to
the
Financial Times
.
Despite that apparent vow to quit the U.S. market, the company subsequently
changed its story
, saying it would continue to actively sell its products in the United States. We continue to sell in the U.S. in all three business areas: Device, Carrier Network and Enterprise, Huawei spokesperson Jannie Luong told
Network Computing
in April.
In the wake of the Oct. 2012 Congressional report, Australia, India and the United Kingdom were already evaluating whether they would continue to work with Huawei and ZTE. Notably, Indias Research and Analysis Wing -- the governments main intelligence service -- issued a report warning that Huawei Technologies is known to have links with the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) and the ministry of state security of China.
In response, Huawei proposed that
Australia create an information security test center
to vet the companys products.
But fears of Chinese espionage were further compounded this week, after an annual report from the Pentagon to Congress
directly accused China
of running a military cyber-espionage operation that directly accessed U.S. government systems. China is using its computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the U.S. diplomatic, economic and defense industrial base sectors that support U.S. national defense programs, according to the report.
In the wake of that warning, Huawei and ZTE appear to be facing fresh scrutiny by Indian government officials, who said this week that theyre creating a testing lab to assess all foreign-built telecommunications and networking equipment. We know about the concerns of intelligence agencies and are expediting developing [a] system for testing the telecom equipments of foreign manufacturers in networks, an India government telecommunications official
told Indias
Hindustan Times
.
Information security experts, however, say that backdoors purposefully built into networking hardware can be
notoriously difficult to detect
, and warned that devices could also be
clean when purchased
but later updated with firmware that enables spying.
Furthermore, in a 2012 teardown of the Huawei AR8 and ARE 29 series routers, Felix FX Lindner, who heads Berlin-based Recurity Labs, found that the
firmware contained sufficient numbers of coding errors
that anyone studying the code base might find ways of remotely compromising the devices without needing to resort to purpose-made backdoors.
People are your most vulnerable endpoint. Make sure your security strategy addresses that fact. Also in the new, all-digital
How Hackers Fool Your Employees
issue of Dark Reading: Effective security doesnt mean stopping all attackers. (Free registration required.)

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Huawei CEO Dismisses Security, Spying Concerns