After the on-going controversy over BlackBerry Services in India, Research In Motion (RIM) today submitted another proposal to the Indian Home Ministry on lawful interception of BlackBerry Enterprise and Messenger Services.
The Govt of India has given August 31st, 2010 deadline to RIM to come up with a solution to address India’s security concerns.
Earlier on August 26, RIM said that BlackBerry Enterprise customers create their own key and RIM does not possess any master key to decode the data. The encrypted traffic is delivered through RIM’s servers, based mostly in Canada, though corporate clients can choose to host their servers elsewhere. RIM offered to provide information on a deferred basis and proposed to share IP addresses of enterprise servers, but that was not acceptable to the security agencies and Home Ministry. The security agencies said that they needed real time information, not the deferred one.
Union Minister of State for Communication and IT Mr. Sachin Pilot said “World-over services and email facilities are allowed to be intercepted by regulatory agencies in Government. We will not risk our national security, especially when answers to the problem have been found elsewhere in the world. When RIM has addressed these concerns in other parts of the world, I see no reason why the Indian government and security agencies should take any risk at all as far technology is concern.
Meanwhile, one of the leading GSM mobile service operator Vodafone Essar has inform their BlackBerry customers about the possibility of BlackBerry Enterprise and BlackBerry Messenger services being blocked from August 31.
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) also instructed all telecom operators to ensure that a technical solution for monitoring BlackBerry services in Readable format is made available to the law enforcing agencies by August 31.
nikhar amlani October 12, 2011 at 2:24 pm
hello there…….when will be blackberry service start in gujarat???
Merc August 29, 2010 at 9:36 am
@Agnivo
you can also intercept public/private key encryption using man in the middle attack, when u r in middle of BB traffic, u can give out your own public in the name of other BB user and easily fool the end user mobile thinking that its talking to actual server.
Agnivo August 29, 2010 at 6:15 am
Technically, setting up Indian servers or govt. routers as some friends said above will not and cannot address the problem at all. The messages are encrypted by public/private key encryption… even RIM doesn’t know what’s the data! Just like SSL certs and secure websites…!
Rajesh August 28, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Its not that they can not open their servers. If they can open up to the USA why not to India?
Merc August 28, 2010 at 8:43 pm
i dont know why govt is making so much noise abt this. i m sure all those people that who is govt worried abt, already might have switch some other way of secured communication. its very simple to intercept blackberry services. just need to ask all mobile providers to direct all BB traffic go via govt routers and do a man in the middle attack using SSL certificates that are generated with Blackberry server names. Its simple to do it. Govt need to invest in this kind of infrastructure. becoz terrorists can easily switch from Blackberry to some other service, and govt will always lag behind with current approach. Govt, plz think ahead of time. becoz a terroist has to be lucky just once to create a disaster and govt needs to lucky all the time to prevent these
Sandy August 28, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Good decision by Indian Government.
BlackBerry should resolve and will resolve these issues. It will be very difficult for any telcom company to stop their service in a country like India.
They are just creating awareness about their main features with the help of this incident.
Let’s wait and watch.
santu August 28, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Govt. has taken the right decision. Security should be the top priority of any country. But one thing I can’t understand why RIM is so reluctant to set up a server at India? Does anyone have any idea?