India, RIM to meet Thursday on BlackBerry - source

By Devidutta Tripathy

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion is set to meet Indian government officials on Thursday to address security concerns, but analysts say an amicable solution would be difficult.

India's security agencies have said the services offered by BlackBerry e-mail devices posed a risk as e-mails sent using it could not be traced or intercepted and the government has written to RIM asking it to put servers in India.

"There is a meeting tomorrow," said a telecoms ministry official, who did not want to be identified. A spokesman for RIM in India declined comment.

The government has held a series of meetings with RIM and mobile operators and telecoms minister Andimuthu Raja said last week the Canadian firm had assured the government to provide a solution in two months.

Later however, Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM said in a note sent to its Indian customers that the company does not have a copy of the customer's encryption key and would "simply be unable to accommodate" any such request.

RIM, which has 114,000 BlackBerry subscribers in India, has maintained it operates in 135 countries and uses a security architecture that has been scrutinised over the last nine years and has been accepted by security-conscious corporations and governments around the world.

"RIM does not possess a 'master key', nor does any 'back door' exist in the system that would allow RIM or any third party to gain unauthorized access to the key or corporate data," it said in the statement to customers.

Vijay Mukhi, an expert on Internet security, said it was hard to believe that nobody possesses a key to encrypt and decrypt the messages.