Indian Government Has Access to BBM Messages

On Saturday an Indian publication named India Today reported that the local government has been given its way to tap into BlackBerry devices which will allow the monitoring of BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) messages. To be clear, RIM is not aiding the Indian government in tapping the phones since they never had the keys to BES decryption since each BES installation has keys specific to it.

BBM what has about one million users in India is not as secure as BES although it uses a 256-bit encryption and is also a lot more secure than a normal e-mail. But as opposed to BES, which has specific keys for each installation, BBM shares the same key across all the users so as long as the government has the key along with the encrypted message, it will be able to decrypt anything.

In RIM’s Q4 conference call, Thorsten Heins mentioned that consumers of the device do not value the security part of the BIS as much as the company thought at first. If that is true, then this whole thing is a moot-point since all the people who do not harbor ill intentions (like terrorism or anti governmental plots), don’t really have anything to worry about.