As BlackBerry attempts to stage a comeback with BB 10, one aspect of its sales pitch is that BlackBerry is famous for its security characteristics. Now BlackBerry is losing its security aura.
The timing could not be worse for BlackBerry of a security warning coming from Canada. Canada.com reports that the government department in charge of cyber security has issued a warning “to think twice before sending a BlackBerry message.” The warning is contained in a memo received by Postmedia News using the access to information act from Public Safety Canada. Public Safety Canada is a department of the Canadian government somewhat similar to the U. S. Department of Homeland Security.
One way to communicate using BlackBerry is PIN-to-PIN communication. Sending messages by this method are not secure. The encryption of such messages is vulnerable because the default encryption key is not unique to a BlackBerry but the same for all BlackBerrys. This makes it easy to decrypt a sensitive message sent by PIN-to-PIN.
It is important to note that the warning applies only to PIN-to-PIN and has no impact on other features of BlackBerry.
For years in the United States, BlackBerry had a strong hold in the Department of Defense (DoD). DoD has just released its Commercial Mobile Device Implementation Plan. The plan incorporates capabilities to utilize commercial off-the-shelf products such as an Apple iPhone or a SamsungGalaxy S III.
The DoD plan is bad news for BlackBerry as under the plan it will rapidly lose its dominance. The DoD wants to become device agnostic as it is working towards the implementation of a new mobile architecture that allows commercial devices to be used for classified communications…Read more at Forbes
