Indian Air Force Reportedly Issues Security Warning Against Xiaomi Products

Spacescreamer

Spacescreamer

ex-Mod
In a circular apparently distributed by the IAF to its personnel and their families, it advises against using handsets made by the Chinese company, according to a recent report. Xiaomi is no stranger to allegations of spying on its users - in July, a security firm had reported that Xiaomi phones were pre-loaded with software to spy on you.

Xiaomi assured users that this was not the case and recently, the company has also shifted some smartphone data out of China because of these privacy concerns.

The report about the IAF states that smartphones and notebooks made by Xiaomi have been found to send users' private data to servers in Beijing. This is strange considering that Xiaomi does not have any laptops yet - there are rumours that the company will release one, but none have been released so far. The report also mentions F-secure's findings that Xiaomi phones were forwarding information to Beijing. This does not take into account a later report by F-secure, which noted that the security flaws had been plugged.

According to Hugo Barra's blog post on Google+, data from non-Chinese users will be moved to Amazon servers in the United States and data centres in Singapore. Although there is no indication to suggest that the announcement about Xiaomi moving its data centres out of China is connected to the IAF circular, this move is nonetheless very important for it as it grows.

While it is frequently referred to as the Apple of China, Xiaomi's overseas growth is only beginning. Having the data centres in other parts of the world will address security concerns and lead to speedier services for customers around the world as well. Whether the IAF will issue a follow up telling its members that they can go ahead and buy the phone even after these changes is another matter.
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Source
 
Welcome to the real world... :p

Apple, Microsoft and Google have all been suspected to have been leaving back doors in their platforms for the purpose of snooping (primarily by US Govt). Also, don't forget that every phone gets manufactured in china. So its quite feasible for every phone to have snooping implemented in some part of the hardware/firmware. Is the IAF advising that their employees are safe if they buy Micromax phones which all get imported from china or do they want everybody to use iPhones so that both US and Chinese govt's can snoop?

Due to the allegations about the spying, Xiaomi has been transitioning the user data of their non Chinese customers to Amazon cloud servers in US. Should we next fear about US snooping on our data.
Apple on the other hand is in plans to move all the data pertaining to their Asian region customers to china. So what next. Ban use of iPhones?
 
Lord Nemesis said:
Welcome to the real world... :p

Apple, Microsoft and Google have all been suspected to have been leaving back doors in their platforms for the purpose of snooping (primarily by US Govt). Also, don't forget that every phone gets manufactured in china. So its quite feasible for every phone to have snooping implemented in some part of the hardware/firmware. Is the IAF advising that their employees are safe if they buy Micromax phones which all get imported from china or do they want everybody to use iPhones so that both US and Chinese govt's can snoop?

Due to the allegations about the spying, Xiaomi has been transitioning the user data of their non Chinese customers to Amazon cloud servers in US. Should we next fear about US snooping on our data.
Apple on the other hand is in plans to move all the data pertaining to their Asian region customers to china. So what next. Ban use of iPhones?
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Lol i know that but you came out like a butthurt Xiaomi lawyer so had to comment.
 
^ In the past Israel has lobbied in many gulf countries for use of american& european telecom hardware in some gulf countries . The reason behind that was that israel cannot intercept chinese hardware
 
^Didn't know that but afaik Chinese officials aren't allowed to own iphones and USA has banned ZTE/Huawei products, question is what should IAF personnel use ?
Iball Aasaan maybe but even that is probably made in China :p
 
And what about China made mobile towers?
China made broadband/wifi Routers in almost every home?
Lenovo is a chinese company, all its PCs come pre-installed with spywares. I have seen lenovo PCs in many govt offices.
..Anyone?
 
To be honest, To me, this actually shows how easy it is compromise our defense organizations. Technically, every smart phone should be banned if its because of the reasons cited by IAF, but the fact that they are specifically talking about Xiaomi shows that its a targetted campaign against them. I don't know who is behind this or how they did it (money, influence or something else), but they have managed to buy out IAF.
 
All it takes is a couple of idiots to bring down the system.

That's how Stuxnet was (supposedly) deployed to their targets. It was on flash drives which were dropped in target buildings. People picked them up and plugged them in the computers.
 
The only reason i can see why IAF restricted xiaomi is because of reports that claimed xiaomi sends user's personal data to servers in china. I never saw these kind of reports for mmx or lava or other chinese made phones.
 
Lord Nemesis said:
To be honest, To me, this actually shows how easy it is compromise our defense organizations. Technically, every smart phone should be banned if its because of the reasons cited by IAF, but the fact that they are specifically talking about Xiaomi shows that its a targetted campaign against them. I don't know who is behind this or how they did it (money, influence or something else), but they have managed to buy out IAF.
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Is it in anyway confirmed that IAF sent out an official advisory in reality?
It is Times of India after all.
 
hgps said:
The only reason i can see why IAF restricted xiaomi is because of reports that claimed xiaomi sends user's personal data to servers in china. I never saw these kind of reports for mmx or lava or other chinese made phones.
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A lot of personal data is stored in Google servers too. NSA has direct backdoor to those. It is only because technically India is an ally of the USA that no government office can say anything about it. On the other hand, China is not an ally.
 
hotshot05 said:
Is it in anyway confirmed that IAF sent out an official advisory in reality?
It is Times of India after all.
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It did in fact (based on reports by various news sites as well as TV channels) and it is not an advisory at all. IAF apparently "banned" its personnel from using Xiaomi made devices

hgps said:
The only reason i can see why IAF restricted xiaomi is because of reports that claimed xiaomi sends user's personal data to servers in china. I never saw these kind of reports for mmx or lava or other chinese made phones.
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And the only reason Xiaomi got highlighted was because there were a lot of parties trying to find some dirt against it. The Original F-Secure report was pointing to the data communication to their cloud servers. Xiaomi addressed the issue immediately by disabling the cloud facility by default and letting users enable it manually. After that, there was a follow up report stating that the issue was resolved.

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002731.html
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002734.html

MMX and Lava phones obviously don't have their own cloud services, so you won't see any data going out in such an obvious manner. But if any of these phones have spying inbuilt into them, it would never be implemented in such an obvious manner that somebody would be able to watch HTTP requests and infer that the data is going to a china based server. Both the nature of the data and the destination would be masked.

So basically its either that some party bought out IAF and using them for giving bad PR to Xiaomi or the much worse alternative is that IAF is so incompetent and slow to react that they caught up on a news report that was released nearly 3 months ago and acting on it now without even noticing the follow up.
 
This way a lot of stuff should be banned. Huwai and ZTE types of companies are well integrated into our systems. Seems like a programmed attack. Shame on IAF.
 
asingh said:
This way a lot of stuff should be banned. Huwai and ZTE types of companies are well integrated into our systems. Seems like a programmed attack. Shame on IAF.
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Afaik, Chinese military sabotaged BSNL's base station using HUAWEI's equipment. After such a major security breach, these chinese companies shouldnt have been allowed to flourish unchecked.

ZTE and HUAWEI have been banned in USA long ago.
It was pretty surprising that these brands were allowed here. If we do not have an active/capable dept for detecting the covert operations/capabilities of those firms, they should have taken cue from the other govts.
 
^^ Yeah, lets stop the Chinese stuff and then do what exactly? Go right back to the stone age? :rolleyes:

I think the Governments and the people are grossly underestimating the amount of dependency they have on china. They have already conquered the world without using their military power. Right now they can cripple any country by just denying them access to their factories.

Instead of developing the capability to build electronics/technology products inside the country, we have very successfully shooed away what little we got (Ex: Nokia Factory in Tamilnadu). So, lets not get too delusional about not having to depend on china to barely cling on to the Information age.

From what I heard, majority of IAF's communication and radar equipment is also obtained for cheap from china. Hows that for irony.
 
Lord Nemesis said:
Yeah, lets stop the Chinese stuff and then do what exactly? Go right back to the stone age?
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It is true that the chinese cheap products have become indispensable in today's times, but atleast there should be more awareness among people. Using non chinese products at critical places and wherever possible should be something which can be looked into.

I dont know how much viable it will be, but say instead of picking up chinese products for their cheapness, going in for non shady companies should be a natural thought process. Something like D Link instead of a Huawei should be preferred?
 
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