BBM Protected was launched by Blackberry on Monday to upgrade the security of its BBM messaging service for enterprises. This is the first solution in its recently announced eBBM Suite for “secure enterprise-class messaging. The service offers an additional layer of encryption for BBM messages and is geared towards regulated and highly security-conscious organizations like banks, governments, law firms, and healthcare providers.
With BBM Protected, BlackBerry provides separate encryption keys for each message sent rather than one key for an entire conversation. A hacker would need to crack the code for each message and then string them together to see the whole chat rather than cracking one code to snoop on your entire conversation.
The first time two BBM Protected users try to chat, they’ll be required to share a secret passphrase to authenticate their identities and generate the encryption keys used to secure the conversation. BlackBerry said BBM Protected is the most secure mobile instant messaging app out there.
BlackBerry said the new client isn’t just more secure than regular BBM, but its logging and auditing options also should make it desirable for companies who constantly need to log information. That means that a company’s IT department is in full control of the security and that not even BlackBerry will be able to peek into messages being sent between two securely encrypted BBM Protected devices.
BlackBerry said that each user, when connecting on BBM Protected for the first time, will need to “share a secret passphrase to authenticate their identities and generate the BBM Protected encryption key used to secure their chat.” That’s just one extra layer of protection that’s not available on standard BBM.
BlackBerry said that BBM Protected started rolling out yesterday to devices running on BES 5 and BlackBerry enterprise customers who have gold licenses for BES10.
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