A question about huawei products

[user6]

Hello i have a question about huawei laptops
I’m in the market for a laptop and because of bad availability in my country i don’t have too many options
i found this matebook 14s.
But i’m worried about possible backdoors as i’ve seen the controversy srounding huawei a few years ago I want to ask u guys who r better informed about privacy then me, should i stay away from it or should i buy it ?
Thank u in advance

[Average_Joe (Joey)]

@user6

Hello i have a question about huawei laptops
I’m in the market for a laptop and because of bad availability in my country i don’t have too many options
i found this matebook 14s.
But i’m worried about possible backdoors as i’ve seen the controversy srounding huawei a few years ago I want to ask u guys who r better informed about privacy then me, should i stay away from it or should i buy it ?
Thank u in advance

Welcome to the community!

I’m not sure why nobody has replied to you because Huawei is a controversial company with it being banned in the USA.

This link covers the situation fairly well: U.S. bans new Huawei, ZTE equipment sales, citing national security risk | Reuters

I’ve used a Huawei phone in the past and it was very durable and didn’t require a constant link to the Internet to access files.

This thread would be helpful to you:

Are Chinese android OEMs unsecure?

This is satire, right ? There is only little you can do when having a Mainstream phone, so hardening it, be cautious, etc. might only make it 50% safer and more private, as the other 50% is all the closed source spyware that you can’t remove. The CA tip is good, although. Thanks for the sources, the Wired article looks quite interresting.

This post in particular will help you: Are Chinese android OEMs unsecure? - #5 by Encounter5729

[Encounter5729]

You could install Linux and you will be mostly fine

[Average_Joe (Joey)]

@Encounter5729

You could install Linux and you will be mostly fine

I appreciate your reply!

Even if the Linux OS you install on the hardware is 100% secure and locked down, how does this counter a hardware backdoor that comes pre-installed on the device you buy??

[TinFoilHat]

For chinese manufecturers, esp. Bigger brand names, I don’t trust them from firmware (bios) level. For smaller brands i think low level formatting the whole drive and install new OS yourself should be fine. Just make sure you download all drivers straight from chips manfecturer like broadcom, qualcomm, realtek, amd, intel, etc. NOT from device manufecturer.

Hardware backdoors are more difficult to conceal and requires system driver support to operate (mostly) so thats less a concern.

[wojciechxtx (Wojciech)]

@Average_Joe

hardware backdoor that comes pre-installed on the device you buy??

Three things here:

1. one cannot (un)install hardware backdoor, because its not software.
2. in case of software backdoor its enough to just format drive.
3. Sometimes, in order to preserve backdoor, and make it format-proof, bad actors install backdoor in memory. That makes removing it more difficult, although not impossible.