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Ask HN: Should we be concerned with the Nexus 6P from Huawei?

by coned88 on 10/18/15, 9:10 PM with 5 comments

I just recently found out that Huawei has a long history of not so honest practices and the US government at least heavily warns against using their telecom products. More about this specific concern can be found here http://www.cbsnews.com/news/huawei-probed-for-security-espionage-risk/

I actually learned this from a comment here on HN from rl3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10297879#up_10300668

As somebody who ordered the 6P I was very concerned and wanted to see what the community thought of this. Further thought doesn't have me much concerned about backdoors for the chinese government. Why would they be interested in me, an American citizen. But what does have me more concerned is the NSA's ability to find and exploit that backdoor. In fact I believe the Snowden docs showed this was the plan.

I don't know if this is even worth worrying about considering the baseband.

What do you folks think?

  • by thecupisblue on 10/19/15, 11:13 AM

    If you're worried about Huawei Phones, don't use ones with their EMUI ROM. Considering the 6P has been developed and is sold by Google, I trust that it is as safe to use (if not safer) than most mainstream devices. It is beyond doubt that google's engineers and lawyers have checked everything before even partnering with Huawei, since discovering any backdoor would be a huge lawsuit on their own door.

  • by GFischer on 10/19/15, 12:10 PM

    I have a Huawei phone (Ascend P7), and I'm pretty happy with it.

    If I were to be concerned, I'd be more worried about them fudging the performance data. As others posted, if you're worried about spying, don't own a mobile device.

    I posted this before:

    "I have a Huawei Ascend P7. It's miles better than my last phone (LG G2 mini). I find the build quality to be very good. I had it survive a very bad fall. The performance is decent, not as good as modern flagships, but an awesome price to performance ratio (I got it for 180 dollars, it goes for 250 unlocked these days). They did do a Volkswagen-style cheat on the FutureMark benchmark: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8403/examining-huaweis-benchma.... so yes, they might be on the "sketchy" camp. But I've found most of the premium stuff from China to be as good or better than equivalents from other countries, my girlfriend has a Lenovo phone and it's excellent too."

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300656

  • by switch007 on 10/19/15, 7:28 AM

    > I don't know if this is even worth worrying about considering the baseband.

    Yup. If you are worried at all, don't own a mobile device.

  • by GTP on 10/20/15, 10:08 AM

    You can't do anything in case of an hardware backdoor but software backdoors are more likely than hw ones and you can prevent them using a trusted custom ROM.

  • by TurboHaskal on 10/21/15, 11:21 AM

    You care about a given piece of hardware's status on backdoors, so that you can run Android and use Google services?

    ayy