India wanted a way to monitor the data and voice traffic over Blackberrys but lacked the technology to do it itself.  India just does not have the ability to monitor Blackberry traffic and preserve the high level of security that RIM (Research In Motion) has built into their system.

RIM and India have been in talks for months over security features provided in every Blackberry.  India’s current security structure would “have trouble decrypting anything using a 40-bit standard”, much less the 128 bit security standard used in Blackberrys.

The last proposal by RIM,to “help the IB to decrypt data sent from a BlackBerry to a non-BlackBerry device”, was rejected by Indian authorities because it could allow private information to be “leaked” to outsiders during the decryption process.

So, to solve this problem, RIM and India will both have a decryption key.  Since both a private key and a public key are required for decryption, they will simply split the keys so that RIM will have the private (customer) key and India will have the public (corporate) key. 

Without both keys, decryption is impossible so as a compromise it works well.  Should there be any leakage of private information, RIM wants the Indian authorities to be the liable party.

This compromise allows RIM to move into a very large and lucrative market, while continuing to provide the level of service and security for which the company is known.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 4:42 pm under Cell phones, Technology.

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