China: To Avoid Spying, Trump Should Swap iPhone for a Huawei

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Cathay and Russian federation are reportedly listening to Donald Trump's phone calls, but China has a "solution": buy a secure phone from Chinese handset maker Huawei.

China'due south Foreign Ministry made the suggestion on Th, hours after The New York Times reported that Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies have been intercepting calls Trump is making on insecure iPhones.

During the daily press briefing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying dismissed the report as "fake news" and mocked the whole state of affairs by bringing up Huawei, which the Usa has repeatedly accused of state-sponsored spying.

"If they are worried that their iPhones may be eavesdropped, they might want to use the mobile phones produced by Huawei," Hua said at the briefing. "If they are still not reassured, for the sake of absolute security, they may stop using all modern communications devices and cut themselves off from the outside world."

China Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman

Hua'southward comments come up after Verizon and AT&T dropped plans to sell a new Huawei handset amidst reported force per unit area from United states government officials.

The principal concern is that Mainland china volition secretly compel Huawei to spy on Americans through its electronics products. Huawei has repeatedly denied ever engaging in land-sponsored espionage, and even tried to play up the security of its smartphones.

Nevertheless, switching from an iPhone to a Huawei handset probably wouldn't have stopped the phone borer documented by Times. The newspaper'southward report doesn't explicitly particular how China and Russia have been allegedly spying on Trump; information technology only says the his calls have been intercepted as they travel through "jail cell belfry, cables, and switches that brand up national and international cellphone networks."

That's prompted speculation that the declared spying may be occurring through a vulnerability in the telecommunications infrastructure that'south been known for years. The flaw involves a legacy protocol called Signaling Organisation Seven or SS7, which was designed to efficiently route telephone calls. Carriers beyond the world utilise the engineering to link their networks together, simply unfortunately the SS7 protocol tin also exist exploited by spy agencies to tap telephone calls, collect text messages, and track people'southward locations.

SS7 protocol trusts all traffic sent over the network, so anyone with access to the organization can dispense the signaling data. When SS7 first emerged four decades ago, only a few carriers were in control of the protocol, merely now thousands of companies are office of the SS7 ecosystem—some of which can even sell that admission. In Red china, the government owns all 3 telecommunication carriers.

Trump, of course, has access to secure lines inside the White Business firm, only the crux of the Times story is that he uses cell phones so he can chat with long-time friends without having to warning staff about who he's talking to.

On Twitter today, Trump said "I rarely use a cellphone and when I do information technology's government authorized. I like Hard Lines," he wrote. Astute tweeters, still, noted that the bulletin was sent from an iPhone.