Supply chain: Huawei and ZTE

US House of Representatives published an interesting report about their concerns with Huawei and ZTE, large Chinese telecom equipment providers. The report states openly that there are concerns that the equipment, parts and software may be manipulated by the Chinese government agencies, or on their behalf, in order to conduct military, state and business intelligence. The investigation that the report is the outcome of did not dispel those concerns but made them more founded, if anything. We have to keep in mind that this is a highly political issue, of course. But even then, citing such concerns underlines what we talked about for several years now: the supply chain is a really important part of your product’s security and blindly outsourcing things anywhere is a security risk.