Re: Good for them
I wouldn't put it quite so strongly as 'nonsense', but I've carried out security risk assessments for clients with Huawei kit, and my conclusions were that there are real threats, such as:
(a) a magic 'off' button - Huawei could configure their systems to shut down on receipt of a specially formed packet (a 21st century 'ping of death') to facilitate DoS attacks;
(b) back doors that could allow an attacker to gain sysadmin access (which also exist, by accident if not design, in many other systems);
(c) analysis of traffic and reporting back to some central point (I think this sort of capability is rather beyond the fairly basic low-level kit that constitutes most of their current installed base, but that will no doubt change in the future as Huawei move up the food chain).
But none of these seem to be very plausible because:
(1) most Huawei kit is installed in China, so they would be just as vulnerable to these attacks;
(2) most such kit is not directly exposed to the Internet. There are firewalls and IDS/IPS systems in the way (hopefully not all Huawei ones!) that would make inbound and outbound access very difficult, if not impossible.
I don't claim to have conducted any exhaustive analysis of the hardware, and I'd welcome comments or corrections. But it doesn't seem to me that any threat is currently very great.