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Blackberry is suddenly the posterchild for encryption? I thought Blackberry is this service where all your mail and communication is routed in cleartext through their services, a workaround from the days of 1G that they simply never got around to get rid of before smartphones flattened their business.

That is not encryption, if anything it is the direct opposite.




I thought Blackberry is this service where all your mail and communication is routed in cleartext through their services

That's how consumer BlackBerry worked (while other consumer services at the time that had no encryption whatsoever) but the enterprise version was as secure as they could make it.


BlackBerry (RIM) is the owner of Certicom, which holds many key patents related to efficiently implementing elliptic curve cryptography.


Also, their encryption had the key feature that it could be easily run on low powered devices. It was a big deal to run AES on a phone 10+ years ago, but apparently (I dont have a source) the eliptic curve crypto was more efficient.


In enterprise environments, your traffic is/was strongly encrypted from the device to your BES server.




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