[clopez]

> Step two: those Huawei phones with a forked version of Android are sold globally. They are less secure and get hacked.

Why those phones will be less secure and therefore easily hacked? Which kind of argument is that?

How a huawei phone with a forked android is any less secure than any 2-year old android phone from $randomanufacturer (not longer receiving any OS update at all)?

[cromwellian]

Yes, Huawei phones can be less secure compared to a two-year old android phone that is running vanilla Android, because Huawei, and sometimes even Samsung, sometimes end up making modifications to the kernel that expose the entire device to userland hacks.

Google is trying to move Android to a more secure footing with Titan, Play Protect, verified boot, etc like ChromeOS. If Huawei becomes the dominant Android phone manufacturer, there is the possibility for things to be worse than they are today.

[ddebernardy]

Might this answer your question?

> Huawei must raise 'shoddy' standards, says senior UK cybersecurity official

> GCHQ technical director says he hasn’t seen anything that reassures him company is taking necessary security steps

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/huawei-mu...

[ebg13]

Android isn't exactly known for being a paragon of security. The number of unpatched critical CVEs in the wild at any given moment is staggering. At worst this is a step sideways.

[ddebernardy]

Sure thing, but at least Android is open source.

Huawei's drivers, which is what led GCHQ to probe into Huawei's code and write a rather uncharitable report on what their coding practices look like [1], are not. Admittedly, as members of the public we can only take their word for it that they found shoddy code by any reasonable standard. But if the latter is true and any indicator of how they'll maintain their own fork of Android, it's doesn't inspire much confidence.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/28/hcsec_huawei_oversi...

[ebg13]

> Sure thing, but at least Android is open source.

Some of it. Certainly not many of the hardware drivers. There's a reason that updates are dependent on hardware vendors and mobile network operators and that most phones don't have fully functional Lineage builds.

[ddebernardy]

Yeah, well... I think we can agree that it's more open source than other Phone Operating Systems. And that's besides the more important point here, which is that Huawei's developers reportedly write insecure looking spaghetti code.

[ebg13]

My point is that any security argument is a red herring when the baseline for comparison is a wet paper bag.

The thing about exploits is that it only takes one. It doesn't matter if Huawei adds another one when there are already thousands to choose from.