US seeks standards dominance, lets Huawei access previously forbidden crypto tech The US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has relaxed restrictions that barred export of some encryption technologies to Huawei, in the name of ensuring the United States is in a better position to negotiate global standards. A Thursday announcement [PDF] explains the decision was taken because …
That was over 20 years ago... and was arguably useless, The maths has always been freely available.
Check out Huawei's phones. Can they handle TLS and HTTPS? Indeed they can, the crypto is already there.
And it's not as if the Chinese haven't created their own variants. For ECDSA and ECKA they have SM2 (and SM9). SM4 corresponds to AES. SM3 corresponds to SHA-256.
What's more, western companies realize that to do business in China they have to play the game, and are investing heavily in supporting these Chinese algorithms.
Pirate, coz even if the US says they can't have crypto they'll still get it...
Irrelevant, you're a tiny minority. Hundreds of millions of people across the planet can only afford Chinese goods.
And your actions hurt other Chinese workers who have no influence over their governments actions. But you don't care. You're virtue signalling, in other words.
-> The US also worries that China, through companies like Huawei, is trying to create standards that benefit authoritarian governments.
Like hell it is. The USA is worried at being beaten. Full stop. The USA has shown that it can't compete on a level playing field, so it has to use sanctions, restrictions, tariffs, and all the other tools that it has. If Europe had a pair of balls between it, it would tell the USA to get lost. Instead we have satraps whose only measure is their ability to bend over further.
The present situation is that the US technically dominates IT, China dominates IT manufacturing, and between them they utterly dominate the profits from IT.
If you are outside those two, the situation could scarcely be worse, and has been going downhill for a decade or more.
Competing incompatible standards and balkanisation is likely to economically benefit the other countries. We could well be better off being aligned not so much with China's standards, as with the disruptive effect they might have. Supporting the status quo looks like it will leave IT in the non-US west poorer as time goes by.
"New IP" is going precisely nowhere, since no IP equipment vendor, including Huawei itself, considers ITU-T standards concerning IP to be worth the (virtual) paper they are printed on. The IETF doesn't take "New IP" seriously, so it's irrelevant.
Also, "New IP" has nothing to do with government control; that's nonsense and seems to be Trumpian anti-Chinese propaganda. "New IP" comes with unrealistic notions of rigid service guarantees, which queueing theory proved decades ago are physically impossible.
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