BlackBerry backup encryption broken by Elcomsoft
A Russian company that specialises in cracking tools claims it has broken the password protection used to secure data backups from BlackBerry smartphones.
According to Elcomsoft, a weakness in the way BlackBerry has implemented the apparently secure 256-bit AES encryption in its PC and Mac backup program BlackBerry Desktop Software makes it possible to carry out a successful password recovery attack on the backup archive with relative ease.
Relative in this context means breaking a 7-charcter password consisting of small letters with two capitalisation in around half an hour using an Intel Core i7 processor. More complex variations of this basic password could be broken in three days using the same hardware, the company claims, although adding using a graphics processor such as the ATI Radeon HD5970 would cut this considerably.
