GCHQ top official says Huawei’s engineering is ‘very shoddy’, suggests UK ban from Westminster
- Dr Ian Levy said he was happy with Huawei being involved in parts of the UK’s 4G and 5G networks ‘that are kind of dumb’
- Britain is expected to decide next month possible restrictions on Huawei or even an outright ban from the core of the new technology that will drive 5G
A top UK cybersecurity official has accused Huawei of “shoddy” engineering and said the Chinese telecoms giant could be banned from Westminster, seat of the British government.
In a rare interview broadcast Monday, Dr Ian Levy, technical director of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), an arm of the UK’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ, said Huawei could also be barred from what he described as the “brains” of the next generation 5G networks.
“The security in Huawei is like nothing else – it’s engineering like it’s back in the year 2000 – it’s very, very shoddy,” told a BBC Panorama documentary about the company called “Can we trust Huawei?”
Levy said they had found no evidence of “malfeasance” on behalf of the Chinese company and it was simply a question of “poor engineering”.
He said one solution might be to “do something interesting like impose geographic restrictions – maybe there’s no Huawei radio in Westminster” he said.
“Those sorts of things are all options as we go forward.”