Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] "A scanner with a digital output" address@hidden: @stake wows the wireless rubes...]

[Nick Waterman]

Tim Pozar wrote:
> This quote is scary..
> "Internet traffic isn't supposed to be secure," said Jim Balsillie

For what it's worth, the vast majority of Blackberry traffic is 
triple-des encrypted end-to-end with quite long keys. The traffic they 
were sniffing is from the far cheaper "BBIE" version which is pretty 
much just a 2-way plaintext pager with an email gateway, and (like 
nearly all other 2-way pager traffic) it's not encrypted.

Cool hack, yes, but it's a pity this has been seen by the press as 
"blackberry hacked!" when in fact it should have been "2-way pagers 
hacked!" and most corporate blackberry traffic IS encrypted and CANNOT 
realistically be sniffed on the net, at RIM, or over the air.

OK, so I'm biassed, of course   :-)

--
Nick Waterman. Senior Systems Administrator, Research In Motion
mailto:address@hidden  http://noseynick.com/  http://www.rim.net/
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Orange juice; that's the juice of an orange.