Huawei opens cybersecurity centre in Brussels

Huawei will open a transparency centre in Brussels next year. By doing so, the Chinese network supplier hopes to eliminate concerns about the safety of its products. The company announced this during a press conference at its headquarters in Shenzhen.

The press conference of Huaweis rotating president Ken Hu came in response to the rising worldwide doubts around the safety and reliability of the Chinese network provider, particularly with regard to the imminent roll-out of 5G. Several countries, with the United States at the forefront, fear that Huawei’s equipment could be misused by the Chinese government for espionage.

In Belgium, too, the Centre for Cyber Security (CCB) recently opened an investigation into the credibility of the allegations. For the time being, no party has made public concrete evidence that Huawei is facilitating Chinese espionage. Huawei has already responded to the accusations on several occasions and did so again on Tuesday.

When it comes to assertions about safety, it is best to let the facts speak for themselves, says Hu. And the fact is: Huawei has a clean slate in security. We believe that cyber security is a global problem. It is a problem for the whole industry and we have to tackle it together.

Maintaining confidence

Huawei emphasises that it has already signed 25 commercial contracts for 5G and has already shipped more than 10,000 base stations worldwide. For the company a sign of the continuous trust of its customers. Hu reiterated Huawei’s commitment to take all necessary steps to address existing security concerns.

Given our scale, our size and our presence, we should certainly take this seriously when looking at the concerns or interests of governments, society and the general public, Hu says. As part of that effort, we have undergone certification of Huawei’s hardware, software and solutions, which has been done by independent third parties.

According to Hu, there has been no major cyber security incident with Huawei equipment in the past 30 years. Even with the most rigorous assessment and screening by regulators or our customers, there has been some evidence that our equipment poses a security risk.

Just this week, Arne Schönbohm, head of the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BSI), said in an interview with Der Spiegel that Germany has currently found no reliable evidence that Huawei’s equipment poses a risk.

Belgian transparency centre

Over the next five years, Huawei will set aside 2 billion dollars to improve its software techniques, after the security of some processes was questioned by the British intelligence services. In addition, at the beginning of next year, a transparency centre will also open in Brussels.

This centre has been on the agenda for some time and is not an explicit response to the current concerns of governments, says a spokesman for Huawei to De Tijd. The arrival of the centre was announced earlier this year as part of the launch of the GDPR. With this transparency centre, Huawei wants to bring together players from the industry in the field of cyber security.

Huawei is a company that originates from China and we are not a public company. But that does not mean that we cannot achieve the same level of transparency. We have already made many efforts and measures in this area, benardukt Hu. We have never accepted requests from governments to damage the operations or networks of our customers or other countries.