French Gov say Blackberry is Insecure

While looking for a holiday this weekend I stumbled across this story on the EnjoyFrance website.

I obviously did a bit of digging to check if others had reported it and it does seem to be true

https://www.pcw.co.uk/personal-computer-world/news/2192598/french-spies-under-blackberry

The crux of it seems to be that France government believes that email transmission via blackberry is open to tapping.

Immediately I thought that this story would not hold water - RIM the makers of Blackberry will obviously use a encryption technology that will meet very stringent standards.

What seems to be causing the issue is that when mail leaves the French Governments mail/blackberry servers they have to go through some sort of blackberry datacentre as the stated in this sentence

"The Secretariat claimed that because Blackberry data passes through servers in the US and UK, it makes that traffic potentially insecure and a target for electronic espionage."

I still don't think this is true but I did not realise that all Blackberry mail has to go through these servers and I guess if you are particularly security conscious then you would not want your mail going through servers controlled by others that you have no control over.

Oh the simplicity of Windows Mobile and Exchange 2007!!!!

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Blackberry would have you believe that the NOC model is a strength of their service although several hundreds of thousands of people would disagree after the outage earlier this year. I'm not a fan and when we looked at moile strategies we decided against this as at least our mobile email was as robust as our exchange infrastructure. as for security I suggest that any government agency that has traffic which it has no control over the encryption of moving through centres it does not control would be a bit twitchy