Motherboard published today a very interesting article about cooperation between smartphone market leader in the past and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The story says about investigation into mafia killings case called Project Clemenza between 2010 and 2012.
Reportedly, Canadian police got hands on encrypted messages from BlackBerry phones, decrypted them and used later as evidence in court. As a result, 6 men pleaded guilty in considering to commit murder of Sal “the Ironworker” Montagna, member of New York Bonanno crime family.
According to investigation performed by VICE news and Motherboard, BlackBerry encrypts all messages, sent between phones (PIN-to-PIN or BBM messages), using a single global encryption key. This key is loaded by the manufacturer on every phone. This means, that if you have BlackBerry, you can use it to read encrypted messages of other people using the key, provided by the vendor.
The only option to use different key provided by Business Enterprise Servers, so the company can use their own encryption key. But who does that, right?
While Apple is trying to protect their brand and fight with FBI in the recent iPhone unlocking scandal, BlackBerry sits quite.
The bottom line: do not rely on security provided by default. It appears such security does not exists.
