back to article Huawei gets the Kiwi 'yeah nah'* as NZ joins the Chinese kit-ban club

Reports emerging from New Zealand suggest local carrier Spark has been blocked from buying Huawei kit for its 5G rollout. The Kiwi national security minister, however, has given the report a lukewarm denial. China keyboard, image via Shutterstock Australia, Solomon Islands to ink Huawei-free cable contract today READ MORE …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    the power to block "risky" vendors from important networks

    As long as they include Cisco in that list, I'll agree with blocking Chinese vendors.

    I've heard much too much bad news about Cisco lately to consider that its equipment would not be a major risk in important networks.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: the power to block "risky" vendors from important networks

      As long as they include Cisco in that list, I'll agree with blocking Chinese vendors.

      ===

      But CISCO are American, and if anything were to 'leak' then it would be going to our 'friends' right :oP

      and I work within UK SC / DV and there were always questions to answer before you bought any networked kit with that

  2. Alan Brown Silver badge

    "Five Eyes versus hard dollars seems to be the fight going on at the moment"

    Exactly this - and if GCSB want to start getting involved in commercial decisions, then perhaps Spark and other vendors should be sending them the bill.

    History: Back in the 1970s when Spark was the NZ Post Office Telecoms division, it was all lined up to buy some very nice Japanese telephone exchanges and microwave comms kit until the government ordered it to buy "British Made" equipment - which cost more than twice as much as the NEC kit and didn't work very well (didn't meet specs, constantly broke down, consumed a _lot_ more power).

    These days Spark is one of many competitors in a ruthless commercial environment. If GCSB and the government are going to do this shit then they'd better pay the differences and indemnify the companies being forced to take decisions that aren't about commercial realities.

    (and I never thought I'd be defending Spark)

    1. veti Silver badge

      As far as I know, no-one put a gun to Spark's head and forced them to commit to a 5G rollout by 2021. That was their idea.

      If it turns out to be based on false assumptions, then maybe they should learn a lesson about risk management.

  3. bryces666

    5 eyes can't see into Huawei?

    I would hazard a guess the real reason for blocking Huawei is that the five eyes spy network can't see into Huawei gear in the same fashion it has been accustomed to with US sourced gear. It has been shown that the NSA had backdoors into Cisco and other US router gear in the past, no reason to assume they haven't retained that ability.

    I read somewhere that Huawei were bending over backwards to try to show their gear was safe from spies, maybe it really is...

    As a kiwi I'm not sure if I should worry more about being spied on by the US and its allies or by the Chinese (I'd prefer to have all the spy networks blocked). The US seems the more belligerent nation set on world domination via military prowess. They are the ones with endless military bases surrounding China, there would be an outcry and awakening if China surrounded the US in the same fashion..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: [should I] worry more about being spied on by the US [...] or by the Chinese

      Try an experiment. Organize demonstrations outside their respective embassies, complaining about their foreign policies, their attitude to human rights, and campaign against their economic interests in NZ. Keep this up until one of them bites. :-)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Winnie the Pooh

        or try going there (to the country not the embasy) and protest them in a winnie the pooh costume and then come and tell me which is a country you have more to be afraid from.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 5 eyes can't see into Huawei?

      I would hazard a guess the real reason for blocking Huawei is that the five eyes spy network can't see

      One birdie told me a few years ago that it is just the opposite.

      AFAIK, they answered YES to a RFI which contained a vague description of what we now know to be the Busch clandestine surveillance program long before Snowden outed it. They ticked the line that they can deliver to 5 eyes requirements - when nobody was supposed to know it is being done.

      That scared the living hell out of some people - here comes a foreigner and he knows exactly what to deliver on our "super secret project". The rest as they say is history.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: 5 eyes can't see into Huawei?

        AFAIK, they answered YES to a RFI which contained a vague description of what we now know to be the Busch clandestine surveillance program...

        I don't know about that, but ironically the first customer that required such feature in Cisco kit was, I once heard from someone whose name and appearance I forget, was owned by the Chinese government.

    3. MonkeyCee

      Re: 5 eyes can't see into Huawei?

      "As a kiwi I'm not sure if I should worry more about being spied on by the US and its allies or by the Chinese"

      As a kiwi, we're definitely a US ally. The military bases and spy kit give it away. And as a kiwi, I'm more likely to be spied on by other kiwis than any foreign power.

      I had some peripheral involvement with the fibre backbone in NZ, and even back then there were plenty of jokes about Huawei kit. Like telling the network security team that they received a " free promo" switch that they're using in the test lab.

    4. GerryMC

      Re: 5 eyes can't see into Huawei?

      The other two contenders for the kit are Nokia Networks and Ericsson, so not American or UK kit. But they may still be compromised.

      1. Yes Me Silver badge

        Re: 5 eyes can't see into Huawei?

        Nokia Networks and Ericsson sell in the US, so they must include NSA-approved backdoors.

    5. Yes Me Silver badge
      Flame

      Re: 5 eyes can't see into Huawei?

      The "security" argument is supported by the following evidence: zilch. This is blatant toadying to the Americans plus the usual Kiwi thing of pretending to be independent but actually copying Australia. But it's not over yet and hopefully this will end up on a Ministerial desk in Wellington soon enough.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I would hazard a guess the real reason for blocking Huawei is that the five eyes spy network can't see into Huawei gear in the same fashion it has been accustomed to with US sourced gear

    My thoughts exactly. IMHO, that same motive was also behind the deliberate vilification of the one anti-virus vendor in the world who was known for steadfastly refusing (through its entire existence) to whitelist any government spyware, Kaspersky.

  5. phuzz Silver badge
    Trollface

    "Spark [...] is contracted to build a 5G network"

    What do they need that for? Sheep don't need any more than 3G at most.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hello from New Trumpland

  7. Adam 1

    as a left ditchian

    Just a heads up that if our government actually troubles itself to sit for more than a week in the next 6 months, they are trying to pass laws that will force Australian vendors to break encryption in their products if they are directed to by the government of the day through their law enforcement arms. Pretty much the same thing everyone is hung up about Huawei on. So be careful when sourcing Aussie kit.

  8. Simon Brady

    Trust but verify

    A couple of theories that spring to mind:

    (1) The GCSB is doing its job. They have access to classified threat information that can't be discussed in public, but it leads them to the unavoidable conclusion that it's less damaging to NZ's national interests to interfere with healthy commercial competition than to let Huawei kit in.

    (2) The GCSB isn't doing its job. For murky reasons that involve keeping our Five Eyes partners happy they're screwing Spark and the country's future infrastructure over, under a smokescreen of "trust us, we know what's best for you." Or maybe they just like Vodafone.

    (Or, more depressingly, (1.5) The GCSB is doing its job. They've made the hard-nosed decision that the Huawei "threat" is Trump Administration bluster, but Five Eyes is valuable enough that it's better for the country overall if we play along.)

    The problem is that none of these theories are refuted by the known facts. As an NZ citizen I'd very much like to believe (1), and as a grown-up I grudgingly accept that (1.5) isn't outside the bounds of realpolitik. However, with the massive loss of public trust that the intelligence community brought upon itself with the Snowden disclosures you don't need a tinfoil hat to accept the possibility of (2). I do have some sympathy for the GCSB here, because even if they could declassify all the evidence behind their decision they'd still be accused of selective disclosure and nothing would change.

    Ultimately though, it's irrelevant. Whether thanks to conspiracy or cock-up (here's looking at you, Cisco), we have to assume that any technology we import can't be trusted to behave in our national interest. I just hope that the people responsible for risk mitigation view all vendors as sceptically as they do Huawei.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Snooping - yeah, Nah

    I doubt that Huawei snooping on behalf of the Chinese Government is the concern. After all anything sensitive, let alone classified, will be encrypted. I mean we do that every time we use https or a VPN. Larger organisations can easily afford 'commercial grade' encryption of all their WAN links, it's usually an option on suitable routers, and governments are likely to tunnel 'military grade' encryption inside the 'commercial' encrypted streams. So snooping is unlikely.

    I suspect that the concern is a concealed Kill Switch, which would enable the Chinese government to turn off the whole system if they felt like it.

    Or even a Flaky Switch that tells the device "drop X% of packets for 30 seconds, then 5X% for five seconds, then go quiet for a random interval: rinse and repeat" i.e go completely unreliable / flaky as commanded from Beijing. That could be nasty.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Snooping - yeah, Nah

      Yes. As someone working in that industry, the kill switch problem is the fear.

      There is a free book on the internet called “the Huawei and snowden questions” that I would recommend. Pages 40-50 are the meaty bits.

  10. mhenriday
    FAIL

    Huawei gets the Kiwi 'yeah nah'

    So Washington once again leans on a vassal - what else is new ?...

    Henri

    1. Yes Me Silver badge
      Angel

      Re: Huawei gets the Kiwi 'yeah nah'

      Washington once again leans on a vassal

      You obviously didn't read where the head of GCSB said that the decision wasn't the result of 5 Eyes pressure. We all believe him, of course. It was all his own staff's work, of course. He never hears from the NSA, of course. He's quite unaware of whatever goes on in Washington, London, Ottawa and Canberra, of course. (Particularly ignorant about London and Ottawa, in this case.)

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