My Hue Bridge constantly communicates with Chinese servers. Anyone know why?

1

Google

Unfortunately, there is nothing you'll be able to do. I just spent the last few months dealing with Hue Support on this very issue. My network blocks all to and from traffic from certain nation. China is one of those nations that is blocked. I noticed that I was experiencing performance issues with my Hue Bridge. I started with my network before opening a ticket with Hue Support. I noticed the same odd traffic coming from my bridge. It was constantly trying to reach the Chinese NTP server. I understand that it will keep trying since it is blocked, but it was odd that they used a Chinese NTP server. I reached out to Hue Support and got nowhere at first. Their team is nice but don't have a strong technical understanding. I finally got to a manager and a more technical person. They explained that the Hue Bridge contacts both aliyun.com and google.com for NTP services. If you contact their support, you should ask for them to send you their "Hue Security Transparency Report". It has a chart of all egress connections. You will see that they use a Chinese NTP server, servers in EU, Google NTP and it calls baidu.com (another Chinese) site to verify connectivity. They said this is to support their Chinese customers since it may be censored from their side. I noted that it made sense, but did not understand why my Bridge was not attempting to connect to the Google NTP server when it couldn't reach the Chinese server. They had no answer. They ended up pulling the logs and we were able to see that it did connect to Google, but very rarely. It is as if they prioritize the Chinese server. I pushed them to answer why it was not attempting to connect to the Google NTP server regularly as well and they didn't have an answer. They ended up closing the ticket while I was waiting for feedback. After speaking to the manager again, they decided to just replace my Bridge.

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2

Baidu

Unfortunately, there is nothing you'll be able to do. I just spent the last few months dealing with Hue Support on this very issue. My network blocks all to and from traffic from certain nation. China is one of those nations that is blocked. I noticed that I was experiencing performance issues with my Hue Bridge. I started with my network before opening a ticket with Hue Support. I noticed the same odd traffic coming from my bridge. It was constantly trying to reach the Chinese NTP server. I understand that it will keep trying since it is blocked, but it was odd that they used a Chinese NTP server. I reached out to Hue Support and got nowhere at first. Their team is nice but don't have a strong technical understanding. I finally got to a manager and a more technical person. They explained that the Hue Bridge contacts both aliyun.com and google.com for NTP services. If you contact their support, you should ask for them to send you their "Hue Security Transparency Report". It has a chart of all egress connections. You will see that they use a Chinese NTP server, servers in EU, Google NTP and it calls baidu.com (another Chinese) site to verify connectivity. They said this is to support their Chinese customers since it may be censored from their side. I noted that it made sense, but did not understand why my Bridge was not attempting to connect to the Google NTP server when it couldn't reach the Chinese server. They had no answer. They ended up pulling the logs and we were able to see that it did connect to Google, but very rarely. It is as if they prioritize the Chinese server. I pushed them to answer why it was not attempting to connect to the Google NTP server regularly as well and they didn't have an answer. They ended up closing the ticket while I was waiting for feedback. After speaking to the manager again, they decided to just replace my Bridge.

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