French bureaucrats have been banned from using their BlackBerrys due to fears that American spies might intercept their messages, according to reports in Le Monde.

The concerns arose because all e-mails sent via BlackBerry pass through a network run by Research in Motion, the Canadian company that makes the devices. Security experts said that the French Government could choose to route messages away from RIM’s American servers, but that would involve using servers based in the UK.

“The French authorities may still have an issue if they did not feel the European country hosting RIM's servers was trustworthy, or if they did not trust RIM itself to operate securely,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said.

“For a higher level of security, the French MPs could build their own communication infrastructure. They might also consider whether communications over the public internet are appropriate as well,” he added.

RIM told Times Online that cracking its 256-bit encryption system “would take about as long as it would for the sun to burn out.”

Gunter Ollmann, director of security strategy at IBM Internet Security Systems, said that BlackBerries are more secure than standard mobile phones and offer a level of encryption similar to that of secure e-mail systems such as PGP.

“It’s a very cautious response to ban BlackBerries altogether,” he said.

Mr Ollmann added that the French Government – and other users – may soon have to worry more about the security of their BlackBerry handsets than the location of the company’s servers.

Hackers were interested in gaining access to smartphone devices using malicious software, so that they could hijack calls, read messages or even track the user with GPS locators, he said.

Mr Ollmann added that most of these applications were ‘proof-of-concept’ ideas that had not been applied in the real world, but he said that the increased sophistication and power of mobile devices increases their usefulness to hackers as well as legitimate users.

However, Mr Cluley said that fears of BlackBerry-based espionage may distract from the risk of a much greater enemy: carelessness and the failure to use passwords. “It's much more likely that a Blackberry gets left on a train than that spies try and sniff out messages in the air from them,” he said.

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