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Police Say They Can Crack BlackBerry PGP Encrypted Email (sophos.com)
schwit1 writes: Police in two countries have claimed that they can read encrypted data from BlackBerry devices that are being marketed as having "military-grade security." The story originally broke when Dutch website Misdaadnieuws (Crime News) published documents from the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), a Dutch law enforcement agency, stating that police were able to access deleted messages and read encrypted emails on so-called BlackBerry PGP devices. A representative from NFI confirmed that "we are capable of obtaining encrypted data from BlackBerry PGP devices," according to a report from Motherboard. On Tuesday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) also told Motherboard they can crack encrypted messages on PGP BlackBerrys.
It's called "Pretty Good Privacy".
Thirty four characters live here.
BlackBerry has an intense cadre of Internet shills that likely will be defending them within about a day or two. Just watch.
For any sane person that cares about their privacy and safety, this should be the nail in the coffin for BB.
They aren't cracking PGP. This came from the forensics department. By far the most likely scenario is that they're able to recover either the key from memory/flash, or the unencrypted plaintext.
Also, people still use Blackberrys?
Nobody said anything about 'cracking'.
They were able to 'read' the messages after hitting the user with a wrench to get the password.
They almost certainly can't "crack PGP"; they may, however, have found flaws in the way Blackberry uses PGP. Or perhaps they are simply referring to the fact that they can intercept data as it is being decrypted on the device.
I'm curious as to why any agency would announce that it could read these messages publicly? The bad guys now won't use this perhaps? It's akin to the national argument over Snowden revealing the collection of phone records and everyone screaming how the bad guys will now have this info and that put everyone at risk.
Some of it to coerce citizen behavior, like convincing people that the encryption on their phone's isn't effective so that they wont use it.
... BlackBerry devices that are being marketed as having "military-grade security."
To be fair, Blackberry / RIM never said whose military.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm no Blackberry fan. I would never trust the company and I sure don't use one. But I'm surprised that everyone just seems to accept the claim. I expect that if there were any secure device out there that several gub'mints would be actively telling people "oh, we can crack that", a message which comes across as "Don't use that if you want to keep your communications private" and ends up steering people to devices that the snoops really can crack. Maybe they can crack it, but if so why tell us about it? I don't have enough trust in any government to believe this blindly.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Military grade just means it won't change for 30 years or so. :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"So-called" is a literal translation of Dutch "zogenaamd". The Dutch version doesn't suggest that the speaker disagrees with whatever follows. The author meant to introduce a name that may not be familiar to the reader.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
break a series of encrypted emails held on Blackberrys modified by Canadian firm Phantom Secure
Conclusion: (a) don't get phones modified by a shady third party with government connections, and (b) don't take Slashdot summaries at face value (but we never learn that one, do we)
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