A case of China exporting its internal chaos, as Jamie Kenny would say; I was recently talking to someone who had installed a wireless broadband network in China, and they mentioned that they’d had an exciting experience with a Huawei router. Politicians whose constituents include Huawei’s competitors are endlessly insinuating that their equipment is always secretly talking back to the Chinese, but no-one has ever caught them at it.
So our chap was suitably fascinated when they turned the thing up and they immediately started to see traffic heading for an apparently inexplicable address within China Telecom’s provincial network in Guangdong. Now, they weren’t in the province, but of course Huawei HQ is. Of course they fired up a monitoring tool to capture the traffic and see what it was.
It turned out to be the router’s internal inter-chassis traffic, which should have been going to its own loopback interface, but was instead leaking onto the Internet. It seemed that someone in Huawei had borrowed some public IP addresses to use in their lab, rather than either using Huawei address space privately, or else using the designated private address space, had used the address in the router firmware, and had then forgotten about it. (Rather like that time all the D-Link Wi-Fi boxes in the world started asking some guy in Denmark for a time signal, in case you think it’s just the Chinese who do these things.)
Obviously, routing via China would have been…suboptimal, and would have involved passing through the Great Firewall. But it would have worked in Huawei’s lab, or locally in Guangdong. No conspiracy, just internal chaos leaking across the border.