Was BlackBerry encryption really defeated?

The Economic Times has reported that the Indian government has developed the ability to read BlackBerry messages. If this is actually true, there are at least three ways in which this could have been done. Some are more likely than others. It's unlikely that the Indian government will tell us exactly how it can read BlackBerry messages, but we can probably get a good idea of what they actually can do.

The least likely way is that the Indian government actually developed a way to beat the encryption used by the BlackBerry devices. This is extremely unlikely. The encryption used by these devices is so strong that it's probably impossible for the Indian government to beat it.

Another possibility is that they might have found a way to defeat the key management used by the BlackBerry devices. It's almost always easier to attack key management that to attack encryption. It's possible that they found a way to do this, but it's still unlikely.

A third way is that the Indian government found a way to intercept BlackBerry messages when they're unencrypted. In most cases, the BlackBerry encryption just protects messages when they're transmitted wirelessly and doesn't protect them once they've moved off a wireless network. This means that there are lots of opportunities to intercept and read plaintext messages. This is relatively easy, and is probably what the Indian government managed to do.