No access to enterprise mail service: RIM

Research in Motion (RIM), maker of BlackBerry, today refused to provide solution to access its enterprise mail service and asserted that its was not unique to them and the issue has to be resolved at industry level.

"There is no possibility to provide a solution to access enterprise email service as there are no keys. It is in the possession of customer," RIM Vice-President (Industry, Government and University Relations) Robert E Crow told reporters here.

"My perception is that this is not an issue unique to BlackBerry and the company would represent a very small fraction of Virtual Private Network (VPN) users in India," he added.

Canadian firm RIM, earlier this month had also expressed its inability to provide its customers' encryption key to the intelligence agencies for lawful interception of contents.

Enabling lawful access does not extend to BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which is essentially an Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution.

RIM cannot access information encrypted through BES given that neither RIM nor the wireless operators are ever in possession of the encryption keys.

There can be no change to the security architecture for BES in India or any other country as the decoding of BES emails by RIM is not technically possible given that neither RIM nor the wireless operators are ever in possession of the customers' encryption keys.

Earlier this week, BlackBerry had said that it has delivered the technology to monitor contents on its messenger service and had asked the government to issue a directive to the operators to connect to its new automated service.

RIM is installing and testing a new service, to be made available before January 31, which will automatically render lawfully intercepted BlackBerry Messenger messages in a format readable by Indian agencies.

BlackBerry has over one million subscribers in India, which is one of the fastest growing markets in the world in terms of new subscriber additions.