[ISN] Germany's Armed Forces do without Blackberry due to security concerns

[InfoSec News]

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/67156

08.12.2005 

According to a report in Wirtschaftswoche, the Bundeswehr will not,
for the time being, be using Blackberry devices made by Canada's
Research in Motion (RIM) for its top-ranking political and military
officers. The magazine is reporting that Germany's Defense Ministry
has canceled a major order with T-Mobile for security concerns.  
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At the beginning of October, Wirtschaftswoche had already made public
some security concerns that the German Bureau for Security in
Information Technology (BSI) had about the e-mail PDA. According to
the report, the BSI complained that all of the e-mail traffic went
through a data center in Great Britain, so that British security
authorities and the Secret Service would have access to all connection
data and content, which they could then use for economic espionage.

RIM responded that it was not possible to send e-mail data from RIM
servers to third parties because this data was not saved on the
company's computers, but was only passed on. In addition, the provider
explained that the data were sufficiently encrypted with AES or triple
DES algorithms. RIM claims that it does not even have a way itself to
tap its customers' e-mail traffic. In the meantime, the company has
contracted the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology
to test the security of Blackberry technology; in addition, BSI has
also claimed that its own investigation has been partly
misinterpreted.