The year 2008 doesn't seem to augur well for Research in Motion (RIM); first its Blackberry service faced a major outage in North America last month and now the service is facing a serious ban threat by the Indian government.
For security reasons, the Indian government has asked RIM to provide them access to algorithms needed to decrypt messages by 31st March else face a total ban on the BlackBerry service in the country.
The issue kicked off with the Department of Telecom (DoT) rejecting Tata Teleservices' application to offer the BlackBerry service saying that the service does not allow for lawful interception. In turn, the company questioned the ministry as to why were the other operators given the rights to offer the same.
As a result, DoT sent out letters asking the other service providers including Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Communications, and BPL, demanding an explanation and access to intercept emails.
Basically, the encrypted messages that are sent out from BlackBerry handsets cannot be intercepted by anyone. Apparently, even RIM doesn't have access to the content carried in these emails.
According to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), all communication made through a mobile device should be accessible to the government at any given time, for national security. And since Blackberry does not allow decrypting the emails, such a service is perceived as a threat to national security.
So far, operators and the MHA have had two rounds of discussions, while another meeting is scheduled for 14 March when a final decision is expected.
In another development, the first BlackBerry Trojan named "BBProxy" has made an appearance. The Trojan opens up a back door to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), thus making stored information vulnerable to hacking.
BBProxy was mentioned in 2006. fake clains if a trojan at that... Techtree staff need to use google more... or know "tech" and security before publishing articles
by pclp
from mumbai
on 14/03/08 02:58 AM
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