Your IT Consultant

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Can Crack BlackBerry Messenger Encryption

April 19, 2016

The battle over encryption is still white hot even though the FBI announced that they were able to crack into the San Bernardino iPhone 5c. Now we hear that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have had a master key to crack the encryption for BlackBerry phones since 2010. The information became public after court documents were made available following the guilty plea of a Montreal crime syndicate in their role in a 2011 gangland murder. Vice News reported that the RCMP intercepted and decrypted roughly one million PIN-to-PIN BlackBerry messages.

Does that mean that the BlackBerry encryption is broken? Not at all. The messages that were intercepted used the consumer BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), which isn't that secure since it uses a single "global encryption key" that is loaded onto every BlackBerry handset during manufacturing. Most businesses don't use BIS, but use the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) instead. BES allows corporations to use their own encryption key. Even BlackBerry can't access a corporate encryption key from BES. So if you're a corporate BlackBerry user, relax. Consumer BlackBerry users…you have something to worry about.

E-mail: Phone: 703.359.0700
Digital Forensics/Information Security/Information Technology
http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsimek
http://www.senseient.com