BlackBerry Giving Encryption Keys to Indian Government

RIM encrypts e-mail between BlackBerry devices and the server the server with 256-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.

EDITED TO ADD (5/27): News:

BlackBerry vendor Research-In-Motion (RIM) said it cannot hand over the message encrytion key to the government as its security structure does not allow any ‘third party’ or even the company to read the information transferred over its network.

EDITED TO ADD (7/2): Looks like they have resolved the impasse.

Posted on May 21, 2008 at 2:09 PM • 50 Comments