Huawei P30 Pro alleged to be querying China servers

https://en.ocworkbench.com/huawei-p30-pro-alleged-to-be-querying-china-servers-behind-the-scenes/

by kpU8efre7r • 7 years ago

46 34 7 years ago

en.ocworkbench.com

tomupom• 7 years ago

This isn’t particularly surprising. It’s becoming more and more common hearing about these stories, the last one I remember being Nokia HMD and Xiaomi both sending packets to Chinese servers.

A2017U12• 7 years ago

I have a Xaiomi Android One phone and it only pings google servers, most activity is from Google Play Serives which many Android apps require to function, have never seen a Chinese server in the logs. It's probably a different story with the MIUI OS.

Sinkholing all requests the most concerning one Ive found is Google analytics running as root continually trying to dial out every few minutes. It doesn't give up and keeps retrying even after hours of failed requests. This is without any phone/internet usage.

deepVoid3• 7 years ago

Android phones are querying servers in the US all the time.

deepVoid3• 7 years ago

iphone found to be querying servers in the US, discovered 10 years ago.

deepVoid3• 7 years ago

This kind of smear campaign against Huawei is unprecedented and politically motivated in the history of telecommunication technology.

thatfunkymunki• 7 years ago

Was it really necessary to make 3 substance-free top-level comments on this topic?

phyzome• 7 years ago

Well, two of them were useful, although somewhat redundant with each other. Would have been better combined into one.

nutcracker462• 7 years ago

Smear? No, own the facts: Huawei phones (and Chinese phones generally) collect data for the Chinese police state.

mark_l_watson• 7 years ago

Sending to Chinese government servers or Huawei servers? Not a convincing article.

I feel uncomfortable with what seems to me to be a campaign against Huawei at the same time our government is worried about being competitive in 5G tech. I could be wrong through, I didn’t believe that Russia would dare to meddle in our election until there was hard evidence.

gwright2• 7 years ago

I thought it was common knowledge that the USSR and Russia have a long and continuous history of engaging in disinformation campaigns and covert actions of all kinds. But based on the way the Russian election meddling story has been reported over the last 2+ years apparently I was wrong. Lots of people seem to have been surprised by these activities.

The most disturbing aspect of this ignorance is that apparently our own intelligence agencies were among the ignorant.

TaylorAlexander• 7 years ago

Our intelligence agencies are not ignorant of these things. They’re just pretending they are and we’ve believed it.

killjoywashere• 7 years ago

Wait, when did we find out that the intelligence community was ignorant? When they launched a formal investigation several months before the election? When, exactly, did the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of full time employees in the IC collectively forget about Eastern bloc disinformation campaigns?

kpU8efre7r• 7 years ago

"The list of DNS addresses includes beian.gov.cn, which was registered by Alibaba Cloud and managed by China's Ministry of Public Security, according to Whois.com. Another frequently listed request was sent to china.com.cn, which was registered by EJEE Group and operated by China's state-run mouthpiece the China Internet Information Center"

est• 7 years ago

Anyone have seen the list?

https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/maste...

Looks like a troll.

unscaled• 7 years ago

It seems like this is a side-effect from using baidu.com as a connectivity test domain:

https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/analy...

dirtyid• 7 years ago

Also cursory search of ExploitWareLabs highlights lack of publish rigor from previous expose last year. Juice:

Our research team studied the video and we have several reasons to doubt its authenticity. We’ve conducted a thorough audit over the last 48 hours based the few details that are in the video and didn’t find anything. We reached out the researcher and instead of replying he removed the video*. We’ll communicate if indeed there is a risk.

https://avleonov.com/tag/exploitwarelabs/

Tl;DR an amateur with no presence outside of facebook did not actually find what state level security experts tried to find for 10 years.

JohnTHaller• 7 years ago

If it's using Baidu, then China can likely use the phones users to DDoS targets like they did with github.

momofarm• 7 years ago

I think google ads know more YOU than China, why don't you just cut your cord?

He even know what's my favorite porn site, I don't believe china will know that better :)

SethTro• 7 years ago

In the last couple of hours the author rolled back some of their comments.

They way I'm reading this, they were seeing DNS requests to beian.gov.cn which was worrisome. Now they say those are the result of manually visiting baidu.com which makes more sense.

See https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/analy...

netsharc• 7 years ago

It's hard to read on account of the dodgy use of English, but this smells of "amateur security researcher". Of course it feeds the narrative of Huawei paranoia so it makes it to the HN front page. (I'm not saying Huawei is innocent but this article surely is no smoking gun).

jka• 7 years ago

I'm of the opinion that only something radical like a new platform and/or device shift (i.e. away from smartphones to some other form factor, or a new, open, network-local-by-default mobile operating system) is likely to save us from this.

All contemporary smartphones leak a ton via DNS and various background sync processes. Perhaps scrappy developers from emerging markets are more egregious in violating expected norms, but these outcomes are pervasive at the moment across the whole ecosystem.

Gurathnaka• 7 years ago

I'm trying to figure out what exactly this is getting at? Is the worry that these requests to random Chinese servers are nefarious or is this some random piece of software pinging a server for some tiny piece of information?

“ICP Beian” stands for the process of obtaining the Business ICP registration number that allows you to host your website on a Mainland Chinese server. [0]

So these communications could be literally anything on the phone and all we know is that it's communicating with a server in mainland China?

[0] https://www.tmogroup.asia/entering-china-ecommerce-icp-beian...

nutcracker462• 7 years ago

Do tell, why my Huawei P30 Pro should contact Chinese servers without my awareness or consent?

chmod775• 7 years ago

Why should my iPhone 8 contact servers in the US without my awareness or consent?

Because it was developed by an American company and runs software written by an American company.

If I don't trust them I might as well throw the device away now.

Is this really not obvious?

code_duck• 7 years ago

“some random piece of software pinging a server for some tiny piece of information”

that would be called ‘phoning home’ and has the potential for significant information disclosure (IP, location, phone status, likely other information).

free652• 7 years ago

Would be nice to see what they are doing to generate those DNS requests.

dang• 7 years ago

Url changed from https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3685669, which points to this.

kyriakos• 7 years ago

Every windows and ios device also queries US domains. Not everything is done maliciously.

ASalazarMX• 7 years ago

It is unknown whether there are any differences in firmware for different countries/regions.

It is perfectly known that Huawei sells Chinese and Global editions of their phones. It's a pity there's so much vagueness when reporting that you can't even know which edition or firmware were they testing.

I think we'll be doing a service to ourselves by ignoring vague reporting about IT security and decide based on documented and repeatable reports.

Huawei P30 Pro alleged to be querying China servers

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