[sangnoir]

> If we get into conflict with China and it takes, say, 6 months to swap out all the now-compromised Huawei hardware

Do you think a nation-state like China will have great difficulty compromising non-Huawei hardware? This seems overblown because Huawei components will be a small fraction of the attack surface in very connected environment. The best defence would be vendor-agnostic, which might be what the UK government is planning on.

[kube-system]

No matter how powerful a nation-state is, it would still be infinitely easier for them to exploit a known CVE by sanctioning a patch than it would be to find a zero day chain that works.

Also, it would afford them the additional political benefit of deniability in their attack.