No companies are going to bother spend weeks or months reverse engineering the binaries for all of their test equipment. If you really care about extreme security you'd isolate the equipment or just disable the network port.
I'm going to disagree on that based on actual experience. There are also some legal requirements depending on where the equipment is deployed.
As for isolation, that is a slippery slope. I have yet to see properly segmented networks in many small and not so small engineering firms, let alone their employees' homes (and often work is taken home, as we all know). How do you also handle the fact that the hardware might contain RF-capable components? How do you know your "isolation" works? Can you confidently claim that the traffic you see is exactly what you think it is? How do you know it is not something operating in a store-and-forward fashion (ex. it never phones home)?
It also does not take months to RE firmware, most of the time. Truth be told, a lot of workplaces might just ban equipment not coming from R&S, or Agilent, or a domestic/approved vendor.
Still, reverse engineering contracts regularly happen for things like this, always under NDA. Beyond the odd research getting published, most of the time RE commissioned by a customer won't be disclosed to anyone else besides the client itself.
No companies are going to bother spend weeks or months reverse engineering the binaries for all of their test equipment. If you really care about extreme security you'd isolate the equipment or just disable the network port.
There is no sinophobia in the slightest here, this is just par the current climate and widespread awareness of supply chain attacks. I love Siglent gear, but found it odd that firmware would not be available when, for example, with the lower end oscilloscopes all firmware for all HW revisions is made publicly available.
Its not that odd. Sometimes a new version is used internally but never uploaded.
Maybe its needed to support a new hardware revision for example.
Siglent has always released firmware for HW revisions and the bootloader and flashing facilities are capable of rejecting images not compatible with the running HW. Case in point, all their SDS line, especially the 1000X series.
Please name one single example of a case where this did not happen (beyond the one I reference in this thread). The only times this happened, and it is debatable, are initial FW revisions.