[AusNOG] Huawei Enterprise kit

Mon Jul 7 11:08:15 EST 2014

Hi All,

There's a lot of hysteria with Huawei, but in essence, I think a lot of it is quite unfounded.

Considering two out of three mobile carriers in this country rely almost exclusively on Huawei equipment, perceived quality control issues don't appear to be real enough to give them a bad name.

Huawei have a bit of unfavourable history behind them, but there appears to be a lot of protectionism from the US as well. On the one hand, the NSA praises the Australian government for not considering them for the NBN, on the other, it's later discovered that the NSA specifically targeted their equipment to create backdoors for themselves.

It's a false sense of security to assume any vendor is immune to what Huawei or the Chinese government is accused of doing.

I should disclose that I have worked for a software vendor that had me working from Huawei's HQ for a number of months. If quality control of their own products is anything like I had to endure with the vendor I was working for, they're certainly on the right path.

Kind Regards,
Jonathan

From: AusNOG [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Paul Gear
Sent: Monday, 7 July 2014 10:48 AM
To: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Huawei Enterprise kit

Hi Chris,

Personally, I'm more worried about their software quality control, especially on the security side.  Have a listen to http://risky.biz/RB250 - their security flaws sound like the types affecting home NASs and one-man PHP coding shops, not enterprise-grade suppliers.

That podcast was nearly two years ago.  Personally, I'm skeptical about their ability to turn around such a poor security culture in two years.  Your opinion may vary.

Regards,
Paul

P.S. Note that HP Networking's Comware gear (i.e. not the ProCurve range) contains H3C (Huawei/3Com partnership) roots.  I'm personally a lot more comfortable with that than with Huawei on their own.  At least they have established security teams and defined processes for issuing advisories.

On 07/07/2014 08:55 AM, Chris Gibbs wrote:
Hey all,

After recently listening to a packet pusher podcast on Huawei (sponsored by Huawei), I thought it might be a good topic to drag up again. http://packetpushers.net/show-193-huawei-cloudengine-cloudfabric-sponsored/

I know ASIO recommended that NBNCo ban Huawei from bidding. Maybe justifiable for the core/PE but does the same ban hold true for customer and enterprise kit? Not being 'privy' to ASIO recommendations I'm not sure either way.

Being government, I think we can request from the ASD generalised information but their current Evaluated products list doesn't contain any products from Huawei. http://www.asd.gov.au/infosec/epl/index.php

In the CPE and enterprise markets, what are people experience and general opinion of their routing and switching products?

We are currently an all Cisco shop but due to pressures on our budget have been reviewing this decision and testing out kit from Juniper and HP. Just wondering if we should be testing out Huawei kit too.

Cheers,

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Chris Gibbs
Network and Security Engineer | Information Management & Technology
Gosford City Council
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