How about having political contributions cappedor banned in the presedential elections altogether?
NZ Greens against Huawei involvement in Broadband rollout.
The Green Party is calling on the Government to seriously consider the damning findings of the United States House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee report into Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.
The House committee reported it had received credible allegations that Huawei may be guilty of bribery and corruption, discriminatory behavior and copyright infringement and recommends that U.S. network providers and system developers are "strongly encouraged to seek other vendors for their projects".
"The Government should review using Huawei on broadband rollout in order to protect our economy, information and intellectual property from cyber-attack," said Green Party ICT spokesperson Gareth Hughes.
"Despite the Australian Government and the U.S. House of Representatives both taking steps to minimise the risk of Huawei operating in their countries, our Government is doing nothing to ensure the integrity of our telecommunications infrastructure.
"The House of Representatives have raised real concerns about Huawei that our Government should take seriously.
"The New Zealand taxpayer shouldn't be giving Huawei hundreds of millions of dollars to make it easier for Beijing to potentially spy on us.
"The Government was irresponsible to dismiss legitimate concerns about Huawei in March when Australia blocked the company from being involved in their fibre rollout.
"It’s unlikely that John Key and his spy agencies would know something both the US and Australia Governments don't and it is now prudent to review our relationship with Huawei in light of this new information."
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I dont know myself, but with plenty of articles like this floating around, perhaps the Greens have a point.
Hackers reveal critical vulnerabilities in Huawei routers at Defcon
The hackers criticized Huawei for insecure coding practices and lack of security transparency
Security researchers disclosed critical vulnerabilities in routers from Chinese networking and telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei at the Defcon hackers conference on Sunday.
The vulnerabilities -- a session hijack, a heap overflow, and a stack overflow -- were found in the firmware of Huawei AR18 and AR29 series routers and could be exploited to take control of the devices over the Internet, said Felix Lindner, the head of security firm Recurity Labs and one of the two researchers who found the flaws.
[ Also on InfoWorld: Teach your router new tricks with DD-WRT. | Get expert networking how-to advice from InfoWorld's Networking Deep Dive PDF special report and Technology: Networking newsletter. ]
Huawei is one of the fastest growing providers of networking and telecommunication equipment in the world. Huawei equipment powers half of the world's Internet infrastructure, Lindner said.
The researcher, who also analyzed the security of Cisco networking equipment in the past, described the security of the Huawei devices he analyzed as "the worst ever" and said that they're bound to contain more vulnerabilities.
During the Defcon talk, which Lindner gave together with Recurity Labs security consultant Gregor Kopf, the researchers pointed out that there are over 10,000 calls in the firmware's code to sprintf, a function that's known to be insecure.
"This stuff is distrusting," said security researcher Dan Kaminsky, who is best known for discovering a major vulnerability in the world's DNS (Domain Name System) infrastructure in 2008 and who worked for Cisco in the past. "If I were to teach someone from scratch how to write binary exploits, these routers would be what I'd demonstrate on."
"What FX [Lindner's moniker in security circles] has shown is that the 15 years of secure coding practices that we've learned about -- the things to do or not do -- have not been absorbed by the engineers at Huawei," Kaminsky said.
According to the Huawei website, the AR series routers are used by enterprises and AR18 in particular is marketed as product intended for small and home offices.
The Recurity Labs researchers specified during the talk that they didn't test any "big boxes" like the Huawei NE series routers -- which are intended for telecom data communication networks -- because they couldn't obtain them.
Lindner and Kopf also criticized Huawei for its lack of transparency when it comes to security issues. The company doesn't have a security contact for reporting vulnerabilities, doesn't put out security advisories and doesn't say what bugs have been fixed in its firmware updates, the researchers said.
"If I don't know who to contact, I can't tell you about your bugs and this happens," Lindner said, referring to the public disclosure of vulnerabilities.
The researcher hopes that this will be a wake-up call for Huawei customers. The only way to force a company to build more secure products is to make the customers ask for it, like it happened in the past with Microsoft, Cisco or Apple, he said.
Huawei did not return a request for comment.
