Will BlackBerry face a ban in India?

That's the big question in the minds of over 10 lakh (1 million) BlackBerry users in India. The government has now warned that it would block 'BlackBerry-to-BlackBerry messenger' service if the maker of BlackBerry -- Research In Motion(RIM) -- does not offer a solution to monitor messages within a week.
                                        
                                          The Indian government had raised security concerns over BlackBerry messages since 2008. However, BlackBerry still continues its services without complying to Indian security regulations.
While the Indian government wants BlackBerry to allow monitoring of e-mails and SMS, RIM has said the security architecture for its enterprise customers is based on a symmetric key system whereby the customers create their own key and only they possess the copy of the encryption.


BlackBerry's justification

BlackBerry says the messages are encrypted. The smartphone's server is based in Canada where the encryption level is very high and extremely difficult to crack.
And any message going through a Canada server is encrypted and, therefore, cannot be accessed by intelligence agencies in India.

"RIM does not possess a master key nor does any back door exists in the system that would allow RIM or any third party to gain an unauthorised access to the key or corporate data," the company said.

It, therefore, would be unable to accommodate any request for a copy of a customer's encryption key since at no time does RIM, or any wireless network operator, ever possess a copy of the key.


The latest development indicates that security agencies are again finding it difficult to intercept or decipher messages sent through these phones, which use codes with an encryption of 256 bits.

This encryption code first scrambles the emails sent from a BlackBerry device and unscrambles them when the message reaches its target.