The BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) said on Thursday that it had provided a solution for legally intercepting messenger and Internet and email services, but denied such access on BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) stating the company has no ability to provide its customers encryption key.
‘The company has now delivered a solution that enables India's wireless carriers to address their lawful access requirements or our consumer messaging services, which includes BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and BlackBerry Internet Services (BIS) e-mail,” RIM said in a statement here.
However, the enablement of lawful access does not extend to BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which is essentially a Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution.
“As we have stated on several occasions and as we have set our company's principles for addressing lawful access matters, no change can be made to the security architecture for BES customers since, contrary to any rumours, the security architecture is the same around the world and RIM truly has no ability to provide its customers' encryption keys,” it said.
Encryption keys
The RIM could not access information encrypted through the BES given that neither RIM nor the wireless operators were ever in possession of the encryption keys, the company said.
Earlier, RIM assured the government that they would provide the final solution for the lawful interception of BlackBerry Messenger services by January 31, 2011. The company had said that the understanding was that they were to put in place the system by January 31.
“We are pleased to have delivered a solution well before a mutually agreed milestone date of January 31, 2011. We look forward to continue serving our Indian customers with industry products and services that deliver and unmatched mobile communications experience,” the company added.
The lawful access capability, now available to the RIM's carrier partners (the service providers who offer BlackBerry services) meets the standards required by the government for all consumer messaging services offered in the Indian market place.
The company claimed that it had been assured that all the RIM's competitors must provide lawful access capabilities to this same standard if they had not done so already. The BlackBerry has over one million subscribers in India, which is one of the fastest growing markets in the world in terms of new subscriber additions.
