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5G what is reality

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odysseus2000
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5G what is reality

#284979

Postby odysseus2000 » February 17th, 2020, 4:39 pm

Does anyone have first hand Information or a link as to whether the US complaints against 5G and Huawei are true or are they just trying to protect US manufacturers?

It seems 5G will revolutionaries communication but its difficult to know what to invest in with the extreme polarisation between the US administration who are adamant Huawei have spy software in built into their 5G products and the British government who are happy to have Huawei as a 5G contractor.

Conspiracy theories of who is bribing who are rampant and its near impossible as an outsider to get to the bottom of this with so much emotional rhetoric.

Regards,

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Re: 5G what is reality

#284992

Postby redsturgeon » February 17th, 2020, 5:38 pm

Interesting question but clearly the "truth " is unknowable outside of a very tight circle of security cleared personnel at the highest levels within governments.

Even if someone did know the definitive truth, how could they convince you or anyone else?

I could easily write here, " I am X and I know for a fact that Huawei do/do not have spyware built into their products for the benefit of the Chinese goverment." What would that prove.

If I was really good I could probably arrange links to convincing looking websites to "prove" my statements.

What level of provenance would convince you?

Like many things today we are just shooting in the dark.

John

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285004

Postby odysseus2000 » February 17th, 2020, 6:37 pm

redsturgeon wrote:Interesting question but clearly the "truth " is unknowable outside of a very tight circle of security cleared personnel at the highest levels within governments.

Even if someone did know the definitive truth, how could they convince you or anyone else?

I could easily write here, " I am X and I know for a fact that Huawei do/do not have spyware built into their products for the benefit of the Chinese goverment." What would that prove.

If I was really good I could probably arrange links to convincing looking websites to "prove" my statements.

What level of provenance would convince you?

Like many things today we are just shooting in the dark.

John


Yes, i concur, but that does not mean that the information is out there in accessible forms.

There is for example great uncertainty in my mind as to whether one can protect firmware from reverse engineering to determine what is in there or simply replace it with a new guaranteed clean firmware. E.g. Some US farmers have been removing manufacturers firm ware from their tractors & installing their own firmware which they can edit etc as needed.

If the Huawei devices are compromised can they be cleaned by such methods or by replacing say memory chips? I presume most of the 5g hardware can not contain spyware such that it should be possible to contract Huawei for supply of just non spyware hostable hardware & add the vulnerable bits from trusted sources.

I imagine there are engineers who can answer such kinds of points & add others that have not come to my mind such that I can get a clearer view of the situation.

Additionally given the expected volume of 5g communication it seems, at least to me, that any spyware would have to be AI processed opening up all manner of detection routes & counter measures.

Regards,

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285007

Postby AleisterCrowley » February 17th, 2020, 6:41 pm

This 'sort of thing' (spyware, backdoors, intentional 'bugs') can happen , so it's probably sensible to avoid using potentially leaky equipment in critical parts of any network.

As an example , from the world of data security and encryption;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51487856
"For decades, US and German intelligence used this Swiss company's [Crypto AG] encoding devices to spy on other countries, and the revelations this week have provoked outrage.
From the Cold War into the 2000s, Crypto AG sold the devices to more than 120 governments worldwide. The machines were encrypted but it emerged this week that the CIA and Germany's BND had rigged the devices so they could crack the codes and intercept thousands of messages."


I'm sure there's a lot of protectionism as well, and lobbying from the 'safe' suppliers

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285035

Postby dspp » February 17th, 2020, 8:31 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:
If the Huawei devices are compromised can they be cleaned by such methods or by replacing say memory chips? I presume most of the 5g hardware can not contain spyware such that it should be possible to contract Huawei for supply of just non spyware hostable hardware & add the vulnerable bits from trusted sources.

I imagine there are engineers who can answer such kinds of points & add others that have not come to my mind such that I can get a clearer view of the situation.

Additionally given the expected volume of 5g communication it seems, at least to me, that any spyware would have to be AI processed opening up all manner of detection routes & counter measures.

Regards,


ody,

A very long time ago I had a small taste of some of this stuff, and have kept an eye on it ever since. Mostly grateful for not being more closely involved.

Bottom line is that a) almost all major nations attempt to subvert key infrastructure manufacturers, especially in the fields of IT/comms; b) such subversion is of course cloaked in strict secrecy; c) such subversion is almost impossible to practically detect, sometimes is impossible to theoretically detect, and ordinarily is not cost-effective to detect. That's why one prefers to have control/ownership of the entire toolchain rather than merely monitoring.

But UK no longer has that industrial toolchain in-house. This is why UK gov forces Huawei to set up a unit in the UK, paid for by Huawei and under supervision of GCHQ etc, with the basic mission being to prove that any Huawei kit that is being used is clean. However guaranteeing that it is clean in design, clean during manufacture, and clean for its entire lifecycle, is nigh-on-impossible. So the US has valid reasons to be worried. But there are equally valid reasons to think that US is using it as a reason to promote pseudo-US companies (the relevant bits of Motorola, Ericcson, Nokia, etc) for both economic, political, and security reasons. The middle path chosen by the UK is to try and relegate Huawei to the non-core bits of the UK network, and even then to not be geographically market share dominant (<35%). Whether that will succeed remains to be seen. But it is a template that other countries will seek to replicate which is why US is having a hissy fit.

5G is mostly about latency, not individual user bandwidth. It gives very near real time outcomes, sufficient to get a good timestamp. That in turn is useful for crypto and for geographic precision. It is also necessary to allow networks to scale the way they will need to.

regards, dspp

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285048

Postby AleisterCrowley » February 17th, 2020, 9:26 pm

It's all a bit odd as BT's fixed network has a lot of Huawei kit in it (or it did last time I looked) They certainly won some of the 21CN work

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285054

Postby dspp » February 17th, 2020, 9:54 pm

AleisterCrowley wrote:It's all a bit odd as BT's fixed network has a lot of Huawei kit in it (or it did last time I looked) They certainly won some of the 21CN work


I think you'll find they are stripping some Huawei kit out as well.

It is unclear in the public domain whether there is a real issue, or just an allegation of an issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_ ... s_networks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism ... G_networks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G

regards, dspp

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285062

Postby gryffron » February 17th, 2020, 11:19 pm

Can it be done? - yes.
Are huawei more of a threat than US companies? Or Finnish ones? - probably not.
Can we check the sw? - no. It is easy to bury bits of code in precompiled libraries etc. Even if we had all the original source code, the comments will be in Chinese anyway. How many Chinese speaking coders does GCHQ have?

5G routers contain a LOT of sofware. Millions of dollars worth representing millions of man hours effort. The software is a huge proportion of the cost. Comparing it to tractor which is 99% hardware and twiddly bit of software is useless. Nobody has the resources to duplicate a 5G router's software. So writing our own "safe" version is unlikely to be practical.

They'll also auto-update the software from the internet. All modern kit does this. Even domestic household routers. So it isn't in fixed memory chips. If they can auto update it, proving the software it has NOW is spyproof, still doesn't prove that next week's update won't be.

So the practical solution is not to worry about securing the network, but rather to assume that the network is leaky, and ensure your point-to-point encryption is secure.

Gryff

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285063

Postby AleisterCrowley » February 17th, 2020, 11:22 pm

Thankfully all the UK Huawei kit is being checked by a team in a small office building near Banbury. What could go wrong?

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285065

Postby odysseus2000 » February 17th, 2020, 11:53 pm

Thank you for all the super helpful comments.

The more I think about what is going on the more I like the way companies like Tesla have gone for vertical integrated production and the more the whole concept of out sourcing and depending on corporations in a foreign power looks to be a recipe for trouble.

Given the information in the posts it looks like who ever controls the software could, in a military confrontation, disrupt the entire economy of a consumer nation.

There is also the prospect that AI could become self aware or just running some innocent program which diverges from its plan and then insert itself all around the world with out anyone having a clue it was happening until it eventually choose to tell us.

It is as though all the capex on things like the new "big-lizzy" carriers ought instead to have been spent on creating our own manufacturing capability for the coming 5g revolution so that we would control the stuff that is becoming vital to the operation of the economy.

In terms of investment opportunities I have liked Qualcomm as a possible play here, but if they are to be a pure US contractor against the rest of the world choosing Huawei it becomes difficult to know how they will operate.

Even having ones own manufacturing base and control over what is put in the software there still seems the potential for a mole to secretly add his or her own code.

Perhaps NSA and GCHQ have techniques that they believe will keep us safe and functioning in the advent of geopolitical trouble, but the polarisation between the US and UK and threats to the 5 eyes security sharing network maybe suggests not.

Interesting times!

Regards,

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285109

Postby dspp » February 18th, 2020, 9:17 am

gryffron wrote:Can it be done? - yes.

So the practical solution is not to worry about securing the network, but rather to assume that the network is leaky, and ensure your point-to-point encryption is secure.

Gryff



1. The mid-level comms that is on an aggregate basis is not encrypted by the user. It is of course encrypted by the system (including the handset) but with system-level access it becomes easier to either carry out traffic analysis; or brute force decryption; or (as you point out) insert a system vulnerability (the AG Crypto example) to ease decryption (including trying to get that vulnerability into the core comms network).

2. If they had access to the core network, then that would give them the traffic analysis which is helpful in itself; and increase their ability to analyse the point-to-point encryption at leisure; and maybe insert vulnerabilities.

The decision taken looks to have been the only possible one short of declaring poodledom to the US.

This is what it looks like as a medium sized power in a world with continent-scale superpowers. Since there is a fairly low probability of the USA or China breaking up soon we'd better get used to it and prepare accordingly. Oh .....

regards, dspp

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285134

Postby odysseus2000 » February 18th, 2020, 10:55 am

dspp wrote:
gryffron wrote:Can it be done? - yes.

So the practical solution is not to worry about securing the network, but rather to assume that the network is leaky, and ensure your point-to-point encryption is secure.

Gryff



1. The mid-level comms that is on an aggregate basis is not encrypted by the user. It is of course encrypted by the system (including the handset) but with system-level access it becomes easier to either carry out traffic analysis; or brute force decryption; or (as you point out) insert a system vulnerability (the AG Crypto example) to ease decryption (including trying to get that vulnerability into the core comms network).

2. If they had access to the core network, then that would give them the traffic analysis which is helpful in itself; and increase their ability to analyse the point-to-point encryption at leisure; and maybe insert vulnerabilities.

The decision taken looks to have been the only possible one short of declaring poodledom to the US.

This is what it looks like as a medium sized power in a world with continent-scale superpowers. Since there is a fairly low probability of the USA or China breaking up soon we'd better get used to it and prepare accordingly. Oh .....

regards, dspp


Historically the UK has rarely sided with the number 1 power, always preferring to be with the number 2.

The logic being that if you go with number 1 and then 1 triumphs, there is no reason then that number 1 can not turn on the UK and consume it.

By going with number 2 you check the power of number 1 and make your own position more secure.

In this context the UK's position on 5G has a logical component to it.

Regards,

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285139

Postby dealtn » February 18th, 2020, 11:04 am

odysseus2000 wrote:
Historically the UK has rarely sided with the number 1 power, always preferring to be with the number 2.



You do know what the words "rarely" and "always" mean don't you?

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285142

Postby 1nvest » February 18th, 2020, 11:07 am

Spying requires information flow (to the spies servers) - observable. Of greater concern is the simple option to disable the network - at the worst possible time. With ever increasing dependency upon technology, the capacity to control a simple ping to disable (or swamp) that technology is a massive advantage.

What is 'core' and 'non-core' and how can you totally isolate them from each other? I'd suggest you can't, unless you build a duplicate fall back alternative using known/trusted hardware/software to keep the lights on in the event of the primary network/system failing.

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285146

Postby odysseus2000 » February 18th, 2020, 11:24 am

dealtn wrote:
odysseus2000 wrote:
Historically the UK has rarely sided with the number 1 power, always preferring to be with the number 2.



You do know what the words "rarely" and "always" mean don't you?


Yes, that is why I added preferring after always.

Regards,

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285162

Postby gryffron » February 18th, 2020, 12:22 pm

odysseus2000 wrote: Historically the UK has rarely sided with the number 1 power, always preferring to be with the number 2.

Can you give ANY example of when that was true? The Royal Navy was setup to beat the next two in the world until 1914. In 1922 the Washington treaty ceded parity to the USA. The USA, certainly our closest ally, has been number one in the world since at the latest 1945.

Gryff

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285180

Postby TUK020 » February 18th, 2020, 1:26 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:what is going on the more I like the way companies like Tesla


Bingo.

(sorry, childish amusement, I know)

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285211

Postby odysseus2000 » February 18th, 2020, 2:59 pm

gryffron wrote:
odysseus2000 wrote: Historically the UK has rarely sided with the number 1 power, always preferring to be with the number 2.

Can you give ANY example of when that was true? The Royal Navy was setup to beat the next two in the world until 1914. In 1922 the Washington treaty ceded parity to the USA. The USA, certainly our closest ally, has been number one in the world since at the latest 1945.

Gryff


It is one of the themes that Churchill in his histories likes to mention. Probably because it was his ancestor 1st Duke of Marlborough who led Queen Anne's army in the defeat of Louis XIV then the dominant power in Europe.

The history of the Royal navy runs backwards for centuries but was only formed into a unified fighting force after the restoration in 1660. Earlier there were monarch ships. Drake and his associated captains ran their ships as much as pirates as they did as a unified force and Drake took time off while fighting the Amada to gather in some spoils.

It was Pepys who founded the navy as we know it following hostile ships sailing up the Thames and cannonading at will. Only after this humiliation was the power of the Royal navy created under Pepys guidance. Before then there were monarch ships and a Scottish navy.

Regards,

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285226

Postby gryffron » February 18th, 2020, 4:05 pm

odysseus2000 wrote:It is one of the themes that Churchill in his histories likes to mention. Probably because it was his ancestor 1st Duke of Marlborough who led Queen Anne's army in the defeat of Louis XIV then the dominant power in Europe.

Right, so we're talking up to and including the Napoleonic wars. Not really relevant to the last 200 years.

Gryff

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Re: 5G what is reality

#285243

Postby odysseus2000 » February 18th, 2020, 5:44 pm

gryffron wrote:
odysseus2000 wrote:It is one of the themes that Churchill in his histories likes to mention. Probably because it was his ancestor 1st Duke of Marlborough who led Queen Anne's army in the defeat of Louis XIV then the dominant power in Europe.

Right, so we're talking up to and including the Napoleonic wars. Not really relevant to the last 200 years.

Gryff


The admiralty hold grudges for a very very long time, just like the Irish and often reverts to policies from centuries before as and when needed.

Or to paraphrase Disraeli when asked by Queen Victoria if we had any permanent friends, was told no, just permanent interests.

Treaties and agreements from centuries ago are part and parcel of the Foreign Office and UK military operations and their dealing with other nations, as we are currently seeing regarding other nations claiming fishing rights in UK waters based on centuries ago treaties. One could also cite the Falklands, Ascension Island, Gibraltar... as further examples of how the historical behaviours and historical law still have a great sway in many aspects of 21st century life and act to guide UK policy.

Regards,


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