A presentation that promised to disclose "serious" vulnerabilities in networking gear from Huawei and H3C has been cancelled two days before its scheduled delivery date at the request of Hewlett-Packard, the parent company of the latter China-based firm.

Kurt Grutzmacher is the security researcher who planned to demonstrate the vulnerabilities on Saturday at the Toorcon 14 security conference in San Diego. He privately disclosed his research to the US Computer Emergency Response Team in August. The group then coordinated with officials at HP and H3C. Per a standard policy, that meant the penetration tester was free to publicly release his findings in 45 days unless one of the affected companies asked for an extension.

In a blog post published on Thursday, Grutzmacher said he agreed to one such extension, but in September made clear he intended to submit a talk on the vulnerabilities at Toorcon. On Tuesday, he said, he received a "very cordial and apologetic voicemail and e-mail" from HP officials asking him to cancel Saturday's talk. He didn't detail what he had planned to disclose, but a description on the Toorcon site said: "After this talk you just might be able to control a large part of the Internet in a very large CouNtry[sic]."

"So are you at risk?" Grutzmacher wrote in the blog post. "If you own and use H3C or Huawei equipment then of course you are. I have information of serious vulnerabilities and you don't. Nanny nanny boo boo." He said it's possible other people can find the same vulnerabilities he did, but asked those who do to keep the technical details private.