Back in February BlackBerry announced BBM Protected. BBM Protected is pretty much BlackBerry Messenger for enterprise customers. Ever since February we have been waiting to hear more about BBM Protected and what it will bring. We know BlackBerry is the king when it comes to security and have been waiting to see how they were going to bring even more security to their BlackBerry Messenger. During the BlackBerry Experience Event in Washington D.C. we were able to get some more details on BBM Protected.
eBBM which is another term for BBM Protected. Pack inside of eBBM,which is another term for BBM Protected, will be Suite B compliant encryption, which is the minimum for classified communications for the US government. Pretty much the Suite B compliant encryption will be on top of the existing BBM scrambling encryption key, which is also known as 3DES Universal Key. This will be completely auditable and can go across organizations as long as the other user has BBM Protected as well. The first version of BBM Protected will only work on BlackBerry OS devices running BlackBerry OS 6+ and Regulated BlackBerry 10.2+ activations. Later down the road we will see support for Regulated+Balance activations and iOS/Android versions on BBM. Each message in BBM Protected is encrypted with a random key, so if one message is hacked the other message will not be able to use the same key for other messages. BBM Protected, should be available starting sometime in June for BlackBerry devices and will start becoming available for Android devices later this fall.
This will definitely give BlackBerry a leg up in the enterprise division. We know they have been struggling even in the enterprise. With things like Samsungs Knox giving them a nice run for their money. However BlackBerry has probably the best security on any mobile platform that is out there. There is also no other messaging platform that has the security of BBM, let alone BBM Protected.