Blog - Author: Graham Archer

Once again Cisco has gone shopping and this time is has its eye fixed on a French based company call Sentryo which specialises in anomaly detection with real-time threat detection for industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) networks.

Having the ability to network sensors will improve efficiencies and Cisco can offer its control systems to allow better visibility to detect anomalies and better secure networks.

Sentryo was set up back in 2014 and according to Crunchbase has an estimated turnover of £3M annually. Cisco expect to finalise the acquisition by the first Quarter of 2020 but there is little detail on the deal.

This will be Cisco’s second purchase this you when it bought Singularity for its analytics systems in January of 2019. This a lot less than the Six companies which Cisco bought in 2018. Cisco have a history of buying companies for their technologies this is nothing new.

OT or operational networks allow data between sensors to be carried over IT networks. These sensors are used on industrial control systems and could be prone to hacking attempts to shut down or disrupt operations. So, it is important that OT data is kept secure. The normal OT network is made up of thousand of individual components which make them more complex than traditional data networks.

Sentryo’s systems use deep packet inspection which examines the data within the packets to ensure that they do not contain any malicious code. The Deep Packet Inspection engine can be deployed either on existing networks or on Sentryo sensor devices. This means rather than pulling out an existing network it is possible to deploy the sensors on an out-of-band monitoring network.

Having Sentryo folded into Cisco’s portfolio of products will increase their approach to IoT. In January this year Cisco revealed an new family of switches, dev tools and plans to merge industrial networking with IBN (Intent Based network) and traditional IT network security.

All of these new technologies will be handled by Cisco’s DNA center which is used to as a management tool for enterprise networks that has features that can permit automation, policy based segmentation, fabric provisioning to list but a few of DNA’s abilities. This allows user of Cisco’s DNA to provision network resources and apply network policies faster than the traditional manual methods of the past.

There is also Cisco’s IoT field Networks Director that can also manage Ciscos industrial grid routers and endpoints.

Having passive DPI on the network which has the ability to automatically detect new IoT and other OT devices makes the management of network much easier to scale. Also, the DPI element will monitor the traffic between devices to detect any unusual traffic patterns or behaviour.

IoT devices do not have the traditional level of security one would find on mature operating systems such as Windows or Apples OS’es. If hackers could take over or control these IoT in an industrial network it could mean a production line have to shut down.

Will India Follow the USA in banning Huawei kit from its networks?

Huawei has had a difficult year so far. The world’s leading telecoms kit maker and the worlds second largest smart phone manufacturer has had to contend with President Trumps ban on the 15th of March 2019 which effectively stopped the Chinese telecoms giant from selling smart phones or any telecoms kit into the US due to national security fear.

There was a little easing of the trade ban in June when Huawei where allowed to sell some if its products in the US although the company remains on the Department of commerce’s blacklist.

The question that Huawei is asking itself no doubt is how many other countries will follow the US lead and ban its equipment from being installed into their national networks.

India has not had the best of relationships in the past with China and views Huawei with a suspicious eye believing in the rumours that the Chinese government had undue influence over Huawei and there are concerns that the Chinese government is using Huawei for spying on foreign networks. This issue now potentially leaves Huawei out of the bidding to supply India with core networking equipment for its new 5G infrastructure.

To compound Huawei’s woes their CFO Meng Wanzhou is still behind bars in a Canadian prison waiting to be extradited to the US. He is being charged by US officials with obstruction of Justice, money laundering and a ream of other offenses. It seems that the US is gunning for Huawei from all quarters.

Although the final decision as to whether to allow Huawei to bid to supply the infrastructure to India’s 5G network there are continuing behind the scene negotiations between Chinese officials and India’s ambassador in Beijing to see if the Indian government would reverse the decision and allow Huawei to bid in a market that is expected to grow to over $103 billion by 2020. India’s telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has still to reveal if Huawei will be invited or not.

Huawei 5G equipment can be found in networks around the far east, in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand. What attracts national 5G providers to Huawei’s kit is generally the cost. The UK in its usual non-committal ways has still to decide whether to follow the US by barring the Chinese company into its networks or open themselves up to the global market and allow Huawei to bid.

There are currently a few network operators in the UK who use Huawei kit in their infrastructure namely EE and Vodafone with O2 planning to follow their competitors into allowing Huawei equipment into their networks.

The intelligence community which makes up the “five eyes” that consists of the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada are not all in agreement with the ban. Only Canada despite banging up the Huawei CFO has not shut the door completely on Huawei. The UK as mentioned above are procrastinating as usual and will probably fold as is their current default political answer.

The issue here is who should be allowed to spy on their own citizens. After the revelations of Snowden, it seems a little hypocritical for the members of Five Eyes to cry foul of spying when they have been doing much of it themselves. We can only presume that each government feels they have a right to spy on their own sheep and no one else can stare at a given governments property.

India is still on the fence. They are tempted by the cost of the Huawei equipment and one can be in no doubt that the Chinese manufacturer is also dangling larger brown envelopes than their competitors to lubricate the wheels of government to force India off of the fence into Huawei’s open arms (jaws).

For the Indian government has to weigh up the strong possibility that Huawei is strongly influenced and subservient to the Chinese government and is just another cog in the state machine as a front for their spying activities. The Boss and founder Ren Zhengfei is a former member of the People’s Liberation Army raises questions and that fact can’t be very reassuring.

It has been rumoured for many years that all the major venders like Cisco, juniper, H.P etc have always had backdoors and kill switches programmed into them to allow easy access to these devices by government agencies under the guise of national security.

It comes as no surprise then since Huawei got their start in the networking equipment world by stumbling over Cisco operating system “Internetwork Operating System or simply IOS” that they decided to copy the Cisco OS in its entirety including backdoors and all.

These backdoors India claims have been used by the Chinese to access core networking devices. Something which the Chinese deny.

The trouble here is that money talks and when looking at the Huawei price list it becomes difficult to ignore the difference in costs. Plus, Huawei holds about 20% of all 5G patents that has allowed it to dominate the worlds 5G networks.

DON’T MESS WITH CHINA

The issues world governments face is one of having no backbone to stand up to the Chinese. They are afraid of upsetting them for fear of a trade war breaking out. Although to many observer’s the trade seems to be in one direction only straight into the coffers of Chinese firms whilst industry in the west pays the price for the cowardice of their own administrations.

It is possible that the US government have done the right thing by drawing a line in the sand and making a stand to protect their own industries. India as looking at the US as an example to stop the ever-increasing presence of Chinese equipment in sensitive national infrastructure.

Although the UK government in its belief it has found some form of middle ground has conceded to allow Huawei kit to be used in the last mile, such as home equipment and last mile transmitting equipment. This is an interesting proposal since it is much more difficult to repair and replace millions of home modems than it is to replace a few dozen core switches. But such is the stupidity of the UK authorities.

Whatever India decides they will have to live with the fallout of putting all its eggs onto a basket which has potential trapdoors. If India do deploy Huawei equipment and a ban does come, they will be left having to replace all core kit again.

It looks likely that Huawei, everyone’s current favourite bad guy is planning to make a substantial number of people redundant in the United States in the next few weeks.

Huawei, the huge Chinese telecoms and networking manufacturer has been under pressure from the Trump administration which has no started to feel the pinch and has announced that it will be making redundancies at it’s US R&D subsidiary called Futurewei Technologies who employs over 800 people.

The redundancies will affect many hundreds of people working in R&D in Texas, Washington and California.

Huawei, the Chinese manufacturer targeted by a Trump administration trade ban, is expected to dismiss a substantial number of people in the US in the coming weeks.

When Huawei was asked to comment on the pending redundancies Huawai dismissed the requests and declined to substantiate the claims.

Huawei is not alone in having to face the wrath of Trump and it’s foreign trade policies. Huawei are on of nearly one hundred similar firms which has been placed on the US Commerce Department’s Entity List. This does not permit any U.S company from conducting business with firms on the Entity list without having special permissions from the US government.

The Trump administration granted Huawei time for them to allow their customers to setup agreements with other suppliers prior to the Entity list restrictions coming into effect on the 19th of August. This is likely to happen unless the Chinese and U.S governments can reach an agreement.

This all comes from the belief that the US government have that despite Huawei’s claims of independence from the Chinese government that Huawei is heavily influenced to allow access to it’s networking equipment for the purposes of spying on its own citizens and foreign countries too. Although it has been rumour that this has been going on for a while there is no evidence that this is the case.

Some technology experts have often been critical of Huaweis poor system security in comparison to more mature and stable systems produced in the west like Cisco or Juniper.

There have always been rumour of networking equipment from all manufacturers having installed backdoors to allow government agencies to have access to traffic at will. These rumours have never been verified or confirmed and Huawei claim that they have never been requested by their government to install backdoors into their systems.

The redundancies seem to be in line with the fall in profits reported by Huawei. The Founder and CEO of Huawei Ren Zhengfei forecasted that the networking and telecom giant will turnover $100 in 2019 and 2020, which is a third less than they had previously predicted

Although the blacklisting has effected Huawei revenue there were some glimmers of hope when President Trump hinted that some I.T and telecom exports to Huawei could be restarted by did not give any indication as to when that would be and that any resumption of exports will only be on the basis that they do not present a threat to US national security.

How the threats are determined was not made clear. The whole idea seems to be an excuse to keep Huawei and its affiliates locked out of the lucrative US markets where their products are competing against the likes of U.S giant Cisco and other. For the time being Huawei is on the naughty step and time is running out for it in the U.S.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the DoC “will issue licenses where there is no threat to US national security.” and “Huawei itself remains on the Entity List, and the announcement does not change the scope of items requiring licenses from the Commerce Department, nor the presumption of denial.”

Reuters, have said that US firms may be allowed to recommence doing business with Huawei shorty ever since President Trump and the Chinese president Xi Jinping meet last month