ZTE Security Dilemma

Posted on May 25, 2018 by

Recently, ZTE faced some serious issues over the security standards of its devices which seemed to be taking another route as many U.S. officials demanded that the ZTE products be banned from use in the critical departments in the states. However, over the last couple of days, the U.S. Department of Defense stated that the military units now are obliged to stop using any ZTE devices til the company proves the genuineness of its security standards.

An official statement declared that the ZTE devices may be of a great threat to the security of the military units and staff who may be unconsciously exposing information and details that aren’t supposed to be shared with any party. Consequently, the U.S. authorities deem it necessary to ban the ZTE products til further notice.

In fact, ZTE – and Huawei – has been always under continuous suspicion by the U.S. authorities as they believe that the strong relations between ZTE and Beijing mean industries could have some other facets that could indeed compromise the users’ security levels upon using the ZTE devices. In recent times, ZTE had to pay about 900 million dollars as the company broke the U.S. sanctions against Iran; the previous incident added to the tension between the ZTE company and the U.S. authorities over maintaining high level of security standards.

The recent crisis of the ZTE products security standards brings to the spotlight that the company needs to exert a lot of effort to prove its unquestionable and authentic security goals which are centered on protecting the user’s information and overall experience once purchasing and utilizing the ZTE product. On the other side of the crisis, the compromising of information isn’t entirely carried out by the device itself; the apps are indeed very risky platforms to adopt in order to send and receive vital information and messages, and especially the apps that don’t support an end-to-end encryption feature are more risky than ever.

The ZTE company stated earlier that its products aren’t compromising any user’s information, and that its security standards aren’t questionable nor fragile. On the one hand, the U.S. authorities are threatened by the fact that the ZTE products may be punctured by the Chinese authorities and used to track down U.S. citizens; and on the other hand, the company insists that there aren’t any affiliations between the ZTE products and any party that can compromise the security of the users; and until either party proves the truth behind its statement, the ZTE security ban won’t cease at the current time.