Huawei’s Ace in the Hole: Undersea Cables

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Comment/Undersea-cables-Huawei-s-ace-in-the-hole

by mlacks • 7 years ago

214 171 7 years ago

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dillonmckay• 7 years ago

Are there any good links about ‘landing stations’?

mlacks• 7 years ago

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

One of my more ancient bookmarks: http://atlantic-cable.com Mainly history of the first transatlantic link, but also lots on Widemouth Bay and Porthcurno - the two landing stations.

Widemouth Bay is the still active one with a GCHQ intercept nearby.

robbiet480• 7 years ago

Tom Scott had a pretty good video about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl2mQ2HiJZc

Minor correction: Tom Scott's video is great, but I was actually thinking of Motherboard's video which talks about modern undersea cables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMAThVcqzuk

niftich• 7 years ago

Cryptome is a classic source on topics like this [1]. As for what a landing station looks from the inside, Ars Technica had an excellent series [2] on submarine cables in 2016.

[1] http://cryptome.org/eyeball/cable/cable-eyeball.htm [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-t...

programd• 7 years ago

Tangentially related is this classic long form piece by Neal Stephenson from a 1996 editon of Wired "chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth". A great bit of recent transoceanic cable history.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

wrycoder• 7 years ago

And this piece served as his source research for the fiberoptic cable network portion of the plotline in Stephenson’s novel, Cryptonomicon.

ohum• 7 years ago

https://outline.com/R7vGvk is an outline version of the very good (from 1996...) Wired article, "Mother Board Mother Earth" https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

mikorym4• 7 years ago

Somewhat related: How difficult is it to access the "uncensored" internet for Chinese nationals (in China)?

I can guess, but I'm sure other users know better.

hangonhn3• 7 years ago

Last time I was there it wasn't too hard. But it depends on if the Chinese government is blocking your VPN or not. I usually connected to Seoul or Hong Kong.

glhaynes• 7 years ago

Are people there worried about being prosecuted (maybe severely) if they're caught bypassing the censorship?

centizen• 7 years ago

It's not hard, but it's not easy and certainly not reliable. This is a good video on the topic, not exactly about your question but they do cover it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lM_vvmTB_4

AFascistWorld• 7 years ago

Only a few people with good enough English can/are willing to read serious articles.

walrus01• 7 years ago

One of the things you will see is that a VPN will work for a while.

Then it will stop.

Even though they may not be able to break the crypto, it's not hard from a DPI (deep packet inspection) and netflow analysis perspective to see that an IP in China has a high volume of encrypted traffic to/from a single /32 in the US/Europe, and then blackhole that.

The GFW has automated null routing/traffic blackholing functions in place for this.

mikorym4• 7 years ago

Are there currently any (CLI) tools that route traffic through multiple IPs (I mean not tOR)?

For example, multiple SSH tunnels through something like sshuttle where you try to give the impression that you are not threading all your traffic through one "hole".

headsupftw• 7 years ago

It's not too hard but in the meantime it's not trivial, either. I worked for a multinational corporation in Beijing so in the office (or outside the office via corp vpn) we were allowed to access sites such as google.com.

I paid for a vpn service so for personal stuff I was able to access every single site on the Internet. I did this for over two years and never got into any trouble. My impression was that nobody cares if you find a way to browse facebook, twitter, wikipedia as long as you don't use that opportunity to incite subversion of the government or some similar shit.

AdwinWhite• 7 years ago

In my school (top 20 university in China), it's common for students to use vpn. And I think plenty of programmers in China can set up their own vpn servers. Also there are many YouTube videos forwarded to video sites in China.

X-Istence• 7 years ago

Specifically, on top of Japan, the U.S. and Australia, cables connected to NATO members should be off-limits to Huawei.

I don't understand this at all... if the communications across the cable are properly secured then it shouldn't matter what cables it runs across.

lallysingh2• 7 years ago

These aren't military links. Lots of stuff is unencrypted or shittily so.

jsty• 7 years ago

Surely a few potential snooping countries have the capabilities to tap seabed fibre by now, and we'd be better served having carriers add encryption at the link level regardless of who laid the cable.

glitchc• 7 years ago

Huh? Are you kidding? Each cable bundle can transmit petabytes of data per second. Think of all the Netflix movies being watched in Japan and Australia transmitted over that cable. Why would anyone encrypt that? Furthermore, the hardware required to encrypt, even if feasible (and that’s unclear), would be astronomical in cost.

Plus, it’s not just about access. A malicious actor could always damage or destroy the cable, cutting off a primary channel of communications.

SoReadyToHelp• 7 years ago

"Encryption is so expensive!" cries the 1990s

ac29• 7 years ago

That's a lousy example because Netflix movies are definitely encrypted.

dalore3• 7 years ago

Setting up an asymmetrical encryption channel can be hard (and expensive). But once it's set up it moves to a cheaper faster symmetrical encryption which rotates the keys. There are dedicated chips for this encryption that it barely takes any processing power at all.

Also note that would be the backbone encryption channels, but inside those people would be using https which is encryption further up the networking stack.

It's encrypted turtles all the way down.

envy2• 7 years ago

The concern is less about traffic interception and more about being able to sever / significantly undermine a country's ability to communicate during, for instance, time of war. This is also largely where the 5G infra concerns come from.

contingencies• 7 years ago

The internet was literally designed to solve this problem.

the_watcher• 7 years ago

if the communications across the cable are properly secured

I think the history of human communications is an ample demonstration of why this is a poor assumption.

sp332• 7 years ago

Are you thinking of encryption or something? Because that doesn't prevent an eavesdropper knowing how much data was transferred, to and from whom, and when. That could all be sensitive information.

nickpsecurity2• 7 years ago

The Five Eyes governments have access to Layer 2 and 3 encryptors for site-to-site protection rated by their security services to be way more secure than most stuff out there. They also have ability to do constant transmission of packets to hide metadata. Only Defense organizations are allowed to buy them. They can buy and deploy them if concerned about untrusted intermediaries.

When they don't usually means something else is the problem.

kop316• 7 years ago

The issue is probably availability. Assuming Huawei to be an adversary, if they have control of communications, they can decide to drop all packets (or slow or drop some, etc.). This would wreck plenty of havoc on communications.

thinkling• 7 years ago

It seems wise for the US to ensure that they control major backbones and don't become dependent on critical backbone links owned by (potential) adversaries.

Similarly, it's understandable that the Chinese want to start building their own backbone infrastructure so they're cannot be cut off from the world if they end up in a conflict with the U.S.. From that perspective, it makes sense that Huawei would start laying these cables. It can be seen as a defensive move.

I've long been wondering whether the Chinese have subverted IP infrastructure hardware, which is all produced in China, often by Chinese companies like TP-Link. How much of that stuff has a kill switch in it that they can activate if a conflict with the West breaks out?

imglorp• 7 years ago

So... US now wants network neutrality?

mullingitover2• 7 years ago

The issue is probably availability

I imagine every undersea cable would be cut in the first week of a US-China conflict, regardless of who built it.

edejong2• 7 years ago

Confidentiality, integrity and availability. Those are the components of a secure system. Crypto provides the first two. But what about the third?

thaumasiotes2• 7 years ago

The third is a lot less important and doesn't call for the same approaches as the first two.

If availability is compromised, that is obvious to the end user(s).

Spooky23• 7 years ago

I'd assume that "properly secured" isn't meaningful for large state actors.

The US spent billions routing international telecom infrastructure through US and allied points of presence for a reason.

phkahler• 7 years ago

And they really dont want anyone using good end to end e encryption for the same reason ;-)

tyingq2• 7 years ago

Remember "ssl added and removed here"? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns...

arcticfox• 7 years ago

That cheeky smiley face gets me every time

mda• 7 years ago

Not anymore though. Everything is encrypted now.

MertsA• 7 years ago

Yeah but this is different. The cost of adding e.g. MACsec on a long haul link is a rounding error compared to the costs of the link.

megaremote• 7 years ago

Right. And it doesn't matter if the burglars have keys to your house if they don't know the alarm code, right?

_bxg1• 7 years ago

At a certain point you place trust in SSL certificate authorities. Couldn't a company that runs the infrastructure itself spoof IP addresses and man-in-the-middle everything?

munchbunny• 7 years ago

What do you mean by that? Like a country redirects DNS resolution to their own controlled IP's and gets one of their CA's to issue duplicate certs? That could certainly happen and would be devastatingly effective until other people catch on.

Spoofing IP's alone isn't enough, but CA infrastructure is very much based on a trust that is weaker than we'd like to admit.

_ink_2• 7 years ago

If it were properly encrypted it might be negitible. But DNS for instance still isn't. And the BGP is completly broken. There was a case recently where someone used BGP to redirect users of myetherwallet to steal their coins. They failed to obtain a SSL certificate so the users could have noticed. But with a more sufisticated attacker I think the average user has no chance to detect such an attack.

windexh8er2• 7 years ago

It's not just the cable plant but also the transport gear that are the add/drop points for their OSN/OTN. I feel like the article fails to expose this. When the first active element in an optical network is Huawei they can choose to siphon (or worse?) optical lambdas at will.

Platforms like this are common for submarine applications: http://carrier.huawei.com/en/products/fixed-network/transmis...

wbl• 7 years ago

Which shouldn't matter. The network is untrusted.

thelittleone• 7 years ago

Being "properly secured" isn't as simple as it seems because it's not a matter of simply securing against today's threats, but for those in the future, for as long as those communications need to remain secret.

It's possible, perhaps even likely that all communications would be recorded for decryption later when if / new techniques become available.

thepangolino• 7 years ago

Given the billions western nations sink into “cyber security” you’d think those governments would have done something to make sure all civilian communications are properly encrypted. Instead we’ve got Parliaments writing dumb laws regulating cookie policies.

vorpalhex• 7 years ago

Bike shedding in the government? But who will think of the children!

mrguyorama• 7 years ago

And what color should we paint them?

simias• 7 years ago

Those two things are orthogonal. Pervasive online tracking wouldn't be fixed by implementing "proper encryption". Google will still track you, HTTPS or not.

Besides something tells me that the same people who oppose things like the GDPR wouldn't exactly applaud if governments decided to pass a law to make TLS mandatory for instance. I'm sure if that were to happen we'd soon hit semantic satiation for the phrase "regulatory capture" in this very forum.

So what exactly do you propose governments should do to solve this particular problem?

scarejunba• 7 years ago

I think you'd be wrong. Most ad tech companies use TLS and would be happy to comply. The cost of compliance is low. The gains are pretty big.

maxdo2• 7 years ago

Here comes Spacex Starlink + bezos copycat company with better then cable latency :)

gnode• 7 years ago

They're unlikely to be competitive on capacity though. I expect, in most cases, these satellites would relay you to a ground-based base station with as few satellite hops as possible.

maxdo2• 7 years ago

With every launch, SpaceX will add about a terabit of “usable capacity,” Musk said, and two to three terabits overall. You probably right. But all those satellites that are above the ocean at the moment they can be used to transmit data over sea's or between small islands. In this way it will compete with optics. Think of countries like Indonesia.

zengid• 7 years ago

Huawei put the industry on notice late last year, when it completed a cable between South America and Africa.

Somewhat tangential, but not I'm curious about how undersea cables deal with the tectonic plate movements and any volcanic activity on the plate boundary. Then I found this interesting article: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/seafloor-cables-carr...

ceph_• 7 years ago

Undersea cables are laid with a significant amount of slack. It's needed for a cable repair ship to be able to haul up the cable from the ocean floor and perform repairs mid-span.

packet_nerd• 7 years ago

Looking at the cable map [1] makes me wonder, what do they do when cables are crisscrossed over and under each other?

[1] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

djsumdog• 7 years ago

Japan and Australia have essentially closed ranks with the U.S., and the Donald Trump administration is pressuring Britain, Germany and France to do the same -- reportedly going so far as to threaten to withhold important security information if they refuse.

Australia cut off Huawei first way back in 2012/2013 when they locked the company out of Australia's 5G network.

I'm no fan of Trump but I don't see how it's relevant to bring his name into this. This would have mostly likely been US policy under a democrat administration as well. Who wants to bet in 10 years we'll find leaked documents showing Apple and Samsung US lobbied the commerce department for this? Who wants to bet Intel, Microsoft and Google are about to sue because they're about to lose a few hundred million a peace?

I'm curious if we'll see a Federal Court case on this within the next three months.

chrischen• 7 years ago

Apple’s recent revenue cuts are from China. I don’t think it’s in their interest to jeopardy that. They also need China for cheap assembly labor.

jiveturkey• 7 years ago

I don't understand the comments here. TFA article says nothing about data capability, just that Huawei is in the business of running physical cable. TFA doesn't even state whether L1 repeaters are Huawei's equipment (part and parcel with the cable) or someone else's (Huawei just being physical installer).

This article is completely worthless.

YjSe2GMQ• 7 years ago

Poorly done PR.

Breaking News: The Suit is Back! http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

timwaagh• 7 years ago

why are people so afraid of huawei? they are just a telco. they provide infrastructure. sure they can snoop on unencrypted traffic, but thats not their core business. so who cares if the 5g is american, russian or north-korean. if i were the us, i'd be afraid of 1. google and 2. facebook. their business is actually spying and selling that information. these know more about americans than any other company. they see data that is actually sensitive and encrypted. just because they are american companies, does not mean they will not leak to foreign intelligence entities. heck those are very likely on their client list already.

spectramax• 7 years ago

I think you forgot about the Chinese government who is interested in siphoning and censoring information.

anonymouslambda2• 7 years ago

Yes, here is the voluminous evidence that we have presented that Huawei spies for the Chinese government. /s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...

elorant• 7 years ago

Because they allegedly have strong ties to the Chinese government. So theoretically they could build backdoors to critical infrastructure used by ISPs and other network providers.

As for you main argument, we can worry both for Huaewei and Google/FB. It's not either or the other(s).

hrktb• 7 years ago

I am not sure about how we should feel about Huawei, but by this line of argument nobody could lay undersea cables or get anyone to use them.

From the article:

The leader in the global undersea cable market is SubCom of the U.S. Japan's NEC and Europe's Alcatel-Lucent

Each of these have strong ties to their respective government and could build backdoors.

JohnJamesRambo• 7 years ago

I don't think it is "strong ties to the Chinese government" as much as it is "literally the Chinese government." If you can imagine how uncomfortable other nations should be having the Chinese government running their next gen 5g telecom infrastructure everything makes a lot more sense. It's not just the USA that is refusing to use Huawei. Japan etc. have said hell no.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/04/20/cia-offer...

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-leaders-and-founders/article/...

xxgreg• 7 years ago

Fixed that for you: "Because they have strong ties to the Chinese government. So they refuse to build backdoors for the NSA".

est• 7 years ago

Because they allegedly have strong ties to the Chinese government

Do you know which telco companies have more connections to the Chinese government? Every other Chinese company. Even Foxconn which manufactures your iDevice has Communist representatives in their management.

pergadad• 7 years ago

There is a longform article on Huawei which I can't find right now, but essentially it suggested that Huawei's ultimate authority is a "workers committee" which ultimately is controlled in turn by the Party.

That said, it's really not a stretch. To give just one example: There are strong suggestions that Microsoft got NSA money to buy Skype, principally so that MS would revert Skype to a server-based model and take encryption out. Whether this case is true or not, it seems pretty certain that the US government makes use of national players. And it would be incredibly far fetched to even imagine the PRC not doing the same thing.

rb808• 7 years ago

Someone posted this link the other day. https://zeihan.com/my-way-or-the-huawei/.

If enough people have a cold war mentality strategically it makes some sense. Combined with the chance to annoy the Chinese govt in the middle of a trade war, Trump will love it.

ineedasername• 7 years ago

Maybe this will result in net growth of global telecom infrastructure. After all, we can't allow there to be an underwater cable gap!

freeflight2• 7 years ago

Meanwhile, FiveEye countries have been intercepting data through these cables, all over the world, for only God knows how long [0] [1].

Which is a common theme for this anti-China/Huawei push: Just accuse them of everything we are already guilty of. Anybody pointing out the hypocrisy can just be shut-up with a good dose of "whataboutism!".

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secre...

[1] https://www.smartcompany.com.au/finance/economy/telstra-s-de...

shawnz2• 7 years ago

Anybody pointing out the hypocrisy can just be shut-up with a good dose of "whataboutism!".

And that would be a completely appropriate response if someone were to imply that the US' actions somehow justify China's actions. Or vice versa.

Barrin92• 7 years ago

well if you're neither American or Chinese which is true for most people on the planet and you have to weigh which supplier of infrastructure you choose then you do indeed need to weigh who is the worse actor. That's not justification, it's just an evaluation.

9nGQluzmnq3M• 7 years ago

The US may be able to strong-arm some close allies into shutting out Huawei, but it will not be able to do so globally. Huawei beaome the world's largest telco manufacturer with low prices (their market share is ~32%, twice that of #2 Nokia [despite absorbing Siemens, Lucent, Alcatel etc!]), but these days their technology is better than the incumbents as well:

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-european-telecoms-dilemma-huaw...

soup10• 7 years ago

This whole thing is about ease of spyware access by intel agencies, fuck em both.

karmakaze2• 7 years ago

It seems I should be reading between these lines.

The reality is, even if the U.S. succeeds in shutting out Huawei from 5G networks in major countries, the Chinese company could still thwart American efforts to maintain leadership in handling global data traffic.
Security policymakers in the U.S., Japan and Australia have started working together to address this potential threat.

How is not maintaining leadership a threat? I would say it's a loss of market share and control to do as you please with the infrastructure. It's a threat in the same sense as citizens having encryption.

asdff2• 7 years ago

Because the Chinese government is dangerous and actively building a surveillance state and running a little genocide experiment at the same time?

mantap• 7 years ago

And the US doesn't engage in mass surveillance or war? I'm all for sanctioning countries that don't respect human rights but if the US is really suggesting that then they should be careful what they wish for.

karmakaze2• 7 years ago

maintain leadership in handling global data traffic

It's basically saying China doing what the US does is a threat, meaning that what the US is doing is a threat to others symmetrically.

AlexCoventry• 7 years ago

It's a threat to five eyes's leadership.

13of40• 7 years ago

"Virtually all of the world's data transmissions go through cables on the bottom of the oceans."

I'd be mildly surprised if me posting this comment went through a cable at the bottom of the ocean, but who knows?

PappaPatat• 7 years ago

China Telecom’s Ace in the Hole: BGP Hijacking

"China Telecom (CT) entered North American networks at the beginning of the 2000s, and has since grown to have 10 PoPs, eight in the US and two in Canada, spanning both coasts and all the major exchange points in the US. Few other non-American ISPs has such a wide-spread presence on US soil."

"Using these numerous PoPs, CT has already relatively seamlessly hijacked domestic US and crossUS traffic and redirected it to China over days, weeks, and months as demonstrated in the examples below. The patterns of traffic revealed in traceroute research7 suggest repetitive IP hijack attacks committed by China Telecom. While one may argue such attacks can always be explained by ‘normal’ BGP behavior, these in particular suggest malicious intent, precisely because of their unusual transit characteristics – namely the lengthened routes and the abnormal durations."

:s/CT/Huawei/

Source: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Huawei’s Ace in the Hole: Undersea Cables

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