Govt. decodes Blackberry – all set to snoop
After the blackberry blackout and the final nod, DoT (along with Intelligence Bureau and security agency National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO)) has successfully cracked the blackberry code and can now track emails sent from Blackberry devices.
The ‘hack’ has been successfully tested on Airtel, BPL Mobile, Reliance Communications and Vodafone-Essar networks and DoT has made it clear that the solution won’t be shared with anybody including the national telecom service providers like BSNL or MTNL.
Decompression is being tested in operator’s network with three successful testing on Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communication and BPL Mobile..The test is being conducted wholly for non-enterprise solutions” [source]
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About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
The Blackberry enterprise version (BES) is, I believe impossible to crack without keys from the enterprise. There are probably not many enterprise customers in India.
So, this story is about the internet service.
In the internet versio, the consumer emails sent via BB is served by local ISPs using a server provided by Blackberry called Blackberry Internet Service (BIS). This might communicate back with the RIM servers in Canada.
There are three possibilities.
1) RIM has probably just disabled encryption for their Indian accounts (accounts signed up via Reliance, Airtel, etc). The way they would do this is to disable encryption out of the BIS. I hope this is not the case because it would seriously compromise privacy.
2) RIM has provided the government with their private keys and also disabled advanced key exchange algorithms like Ephemeral Diffie Hellman.
3) The BIS security infrastructure is weak anyway and can be compromised. For example, the RIM servers can be made to negotiate a weak or null cipher. I doubt this would be the case.
The ET story you linked to talks a lot about decompression. I dont know the context in which that is relevant. It is trivial to decompress.
[...] Govt. decodes Blackberry – all set to snoop [...]
[...] our govt. fails to keep pace with technology (remember Blackberry blackout?) and instead of upgrading it’s infra, they want to stay happy with mediocre decisions like [...]