Huawei against Huawei. USA – What's really going on?



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Recent articles often deal with the impact of Google's ban on Huawei brand smartphone owners. This comment should focus on something else: the economic and intelligence context of the approach of the US administration.

background

Huawei has been blacklisted by Donald Trump. US companies are now prohibited from doing business with Huawei without a government license. The reason for this draconian move is related to espionage charges against the Chinese manufacturer. The impact of the penalty is huge for the manufacturer: no Google application can now be installed on Huawei smartphones and the manufacturer can no longer release Android updates. And it gets even worse: since Huawei's Kirin processors use ARM brand cores, the manufacturer should no longer even have access to the heart of a smartphone, the processor. Huawei's smartphones could be part of the story.

Huawei scares the United States?

Almost everyone has heard that Huawei was very successful. In the meantime, Huawei smartphones can be found in all electronics stores and even in TV commercials in prime time, new mobile phones are announced. In 2018, Huawei outperformed Apple for the first time and briefly ranked second behind Samsung. But the situation is even more dramatic. While Samsung recorded a decline of 8% last year and Apple, of 3.2%, Huawei's sales have increased by 33.6% over the last year.

2018 smartphone market worldwide

But it is not smartphones.

Huawei's growing reputation is based on the smartphone's smartphone division, which is effective for the media. But in the commercial dispute with the United States, it's not about smartphones, but about 5G, Huawei's 29% market share makes it the world's leading provider of 5G technology networks. This makes Huawei almost as big as its two biggest competitors, Nokia (17%) and Ericsson (13%).

source

According to Liang Hua, CEO of Huawei, the manufacturer is ahead of the competition for at least 12 months and holds more than 16,000 patents, more IPRs than all US network providers.

If you think the 5G is "only" the new mobile network, you are mistaken. 5G technology will be the foundation of the new digital infrastructure and its meaning far exceeds the smartphone. Thus, the high bandwidth and low latency of the new 5G technology, particularly in the field of Internet of Things and the artificial intelligence an indispensable element.

Who wins the race around the 5G, will build the digital highway of the next decade. And America does not want China to have that power.

Trial without evidence

The US government accuses Huawei of incorporating backdoors to its new 5G technology for spying. Unfortunately, there is no solid evidence of this claim. Thus, investigations by the Philippine government and the British government revealed no evidence of concealed espionage techniques. The German Federal Office of Information Security (BSI), the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Office of the Protection of the Constitution do not find any reliable evidence of properties critical for security (source), The only "evidence" in Huawei 's "espionage case" is therefore a charge without proof. The charges against Huawei are a sad reminder of the lie about the weapons of mbad destruction of Saddam Hussein, which laid the foundation for a war in violation of international law. "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mbad destruction"

Those who believe that the charges against Huawei are intended to prevent spying also believe that the United States has attacked Afghanistan and Iraq for humanitarian reasons,

While it may not be entirely out of the question for the United States to suggest Huawei's espionage potential, you should at least ask yourself what the attack on Huawei, the plaintiff, caused. The fact is that even the US economy pays the price of the attack. Multi-billion dollar companies such as Google, Qualcomm, Intel and Broadcomm are losing out with Huawei as a solvent trading partner. From an economic point of view, the Huawei spell is painful for both parties, at least in the short term. The US government's drastic level of action suggests that the US wants to hurt Chinese society or at least force it to leave the Western market. This objective deserves the United States to strengthen its diplomatic relations with China and the losses of its own economy. So why the whole thing?

Could it be that …

Here, of course, we enter a speculative space. No one, with the exception of Donald Trump and his advisers, personally knows why the giant Huawei should be shot. However, to evaluate the situation, it is quite instructive to examine some facts about the relationship between the United States and their relationship with espionage.

As part of the NSA's PRISM program, the United States monitors national and foreign digital communications from leading Western software providers, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook. Of course, there are also exploits for Android and iOS, with which specific devices can be monitored.

But the monitoring of Internet traffic is far from being limited to the software of American companies. The hardware infrastructure of the Internet is also the target of monitoring. The NSA, in cooperation with other intelligence agencies, uses various domestic and foreign Internet hubs to monitor international traffic. In Frankfurt, for example, a node operated by German telecoms was used to read data traffic from various providers (source). In addition, all the major mobile operators in the world (source) have been victims of computer attacks and the world's largest SIM card provider has also been hacked by the NSA (source) in order to eliminate end-to-end encryption of phone calls.

Given the tremendous work that US intelligence has done to infiltrate foreign telecommunications, it is not surprising that Huawei has already been hit by hacker attacks. As part of the "Shotgiant" operation since 2010, the NSA also had access to Huawei's headquarters. This revealed a document leaked by Snowden, which also explains the reasons for the attack. In addition to connections with the Chinese government, it should be discovered that the exploits of Huawei's hardware infiltrate networks with Huawei technology:

Many of our targets communicate about products manufactured by Huawei […] We want to make sure we know how to exploit these products […] "to have access to networks of interest" around the world "(Source)

In addition to the economic aspects of Huawei's ban, these are also so-called "networks of interests" to which we would like to have "access". Soberly, these US government efforts shed new light on the espionage charges against Huawei. First, it can be stated in a factual manner that the US government has already been guilty of the allegations against Huawei. In this case, however, we can talk about facts and not insinuations. "Preach water and drink wine" is the motto. On the other hand, hacker attacks against Huawei show that it is not only economic policy, but also interests related to intelligence.

Could it be that the US government is much less afraid of spying on Huawei than being able to spy on its networks?

From a technical and political point of view, this does not seem unlikely. On the one hand, the Chinese government simply has no interest in providing data to the NSA. China's spying activities should not be described as "interception with friends", given China's tense relations.

On the other hand, it could also be possible with the new 5G technology, that Huawei uses new encryption methods immune to previously known exploits. Again, from the point of view of the Chinese government, with which Huawei is of course entangled, this is only rational. Finally, Donald Trump himself showed, with the proclamation of the national emergency, how much the superpowers reacted sensitively to the espionage of other states. China would be stupid if they did not work at least on technology to avoid spying on their own equipment. And China is a lot, but certainly not stupid.

conclusion

The fight between Huawei and the US government certainly does not concern smartphones, but the supremacy of 5G technology to come. The allegations against Huawei may not be unfounded, but they are still unoccupied. Given the facts about the NSA scandal and the continuous and cross-border monitoring of the Internet, one can rightly call the double standards of the US government. In the meantime, the reasons for the attack on Huawei can not be speculated. It is very important to sell a competitor who has become too powerful out of the market. However, it is also likely to secure access to global data traffic in the future.

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to share it on Facebook or other social media. Unfortunately, the current talk about Huawei is far too limited to the impact on Huawei smartphones.

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