Britain | Cyber-security

Britain lets Huawei into part of its 5G networks

The compromise decision may nevertheless cause a rift with allies, especially America

CYBER UK, a two-day cyber-security conference starting in Glasgow on April 24th, gathered senior spooks and industry leaders from every member of the “Five Eyes”, the electronic-spying pact between America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Delegates debated how “to make cyberspace free, open, peaceful and secure”, as Jeremy Hunt, Britain’s foreign secretary, put it. But many had more pressing questions on their minds.

A day earlier, according to widespread media reports, Britain’s national security council made a decision with major security implications. Unlike Australia and New Zealand, and in the face of dire warnings from America, Britain will allow Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, to supply parts of its fifth-generation (5G) mobile network. This will be able to move data at 20 times the speed of existing 4G networks. But Huawei’s kit, the reports say, would be allowed only outside the “core”, the sensitive inner sanctum of 5G networks.

Britain’s choice is a key moment in a raging debate over how Western democracies should handle Chinese technology at a time when economic, political and military competition between the West and China is growing.

Huawei’s involvement in Britain’s national 5G networks (it is already barred from sensitive government ones) has been debated with increasing intensity for months. American officials including Mike Pence, the vice president, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, and senior military officers have urged Europeans to shun Huawei completely.

They argue that the use of its equipment would facilitate spying or even sabotage by China. It would thereby put at risk the vast flow of intelligence that flows daily from America to its Western allies. “If a country adopts this and puts it in some of their critical information systems, we won’t be able to share information with them,” warned Mr Pompeo in February, with more than a hint of menace. “In some cases there’s risk we won’t even be able to co-locate American resources, an American embassy and American military outpost”.

Huawei’s defenders say that these accusations are unfair. They point out there is little hard evidence of foul play, despite intense Western scrutiny of the firm, and say that China’s kit is cheaper and available more quickly. Excluding Huawei, they warn, would delay the introduction of a vital technology by up to two years and cost Britain around £7 billion.

Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the cyber-defence arm of Britain’s GCHQ signals-intelligence agency, has taken a balanced approach. Its officials have been tearing apart and probing Huawei’s kit and code for almost a decade, at the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC), a body in Oxfordshire established as condition for the company’s involvement in earlier telecoms infrastructure.

In recent years HCSEC’s oversight board has published several reports lambasting Huawei—not for colluding with Chinese spooks but for writing slipshod code, which is just as bad for security. In March it warned that it could “only provide limited assurance that all risks to UK national security from Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s critical networks can be sufficiently mitigated long-term”. At the same time, officials say that the arrangement gives them far more insight into the risks that Huawei poses, and how to manage them, than other countries possess. That is likely to have swayed the government’s view against a total ban.

Because British spies work so closely with their American counterparts—no two intelligence establishments are fused more tightly—their views on these matters carry great weight. Britain’s decision is likely to shape the views of other Western states, such as Canada and France, currently weighing up the same choice. Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, a jingoistic Chinese tabloid, tweeted gleefully that it had “broken the ban” among Five Eyes countries and would “set off chain reactions in Europe”. The fact that Britain has defied its closest ally will certainly give some succour to Huawei.

Even so, Huawei’s exclusion from the core of 5G systems is an important caveat. What that means in practice is not entirely clear. In February Ian Levy, NCSC’s technical director, noted that core services would be secured “broadly the same as the way we secure things today”. The new technology did not change things “in a way that fundamentally breaks all our current security principles and paradigms”.

Others take a less sanguine view. “The distinction between core and edge collapses in 5G networks,” warned the head of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), GCHQ’s counterpart, last year. “That means that a potential threat anywhere in the network will be a threat to the whole network.” Australia accordingly shut out Huawei altogether.

In April Robert Strayer, an official from America’s State Department, agreed that there was “no relevant distinction between the core and the edge of a 5G network”. That is because the need for low-latency (quick response times) means that more computing work must be done at the fringes.

Speaking in Glasgow on April 24th, Rob Joyce, a senior official from America’s National Security Agency, and soon to be the agency’s liaison to GCHQ, picked his words carefully when discussing America’s plans. “We are not going to have Huawei in our sensitive networks,” he insisted. But he acknowledged that a debate over how to define those networks—where they “start and end”—was playing out among allies.

Britain’s hope is that the debate can be handled smoothly, without causing a transatlantic rift. “We can and have coped with certain differences in the past,” noted Ciaran Martin, NCSC’s head, speaking alongside Mr Joyce in Glasgow. After all, the very issue that has provoked this debate—China’s rise as a strategic competitor—means that there is plenty of spying to be getting on with, and ever more reason for the allies to stick together.

But there is no predicting what President Donald Trump will do. Even as the Five Eyes officials reiterated their bond on stage in Glasgow, President Donald Trump again accused GCHQ of helping Barack Obama spy on the Trump campaign in 2016. GCHQ’s response to the president was curt: his claim was “utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

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