Ken's Weblog

People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.

False sense of security removed in India

BlackBerry Giving Encryption Keys to Indian Government.

RIM encrypts e-mail between BlackBerry devices and the server the server with 236-bit AES encryption. The Indian government doesn’t like this at all; they want to snoop on the data. RIM’s response was basically: that’s not possible. The Indian government’s counter was: Then we’ll ban BlackBerries. After months of threats, it looks like RIM is giving in to Indian demands and handing over the encryption keys.

[Schneier on Security]

This means that the “encryption” is just a worthless marketing gimmick anyway. If it wasn’t, it would be impossible for RIM to compromise it because they wouldn’t have the keys to hand over.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *