The wing of the Department of Defence that provides information security to the government has found Research In Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry PlayBook tablet safe for holding classified government information deemed restricted or protected.The PlayBook is the first tablet to be approved by the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) for use in Australian Government agencies after the organisation completed a recent cryptographic evaluation on the device.
“Encryption is primarily used to provide confidentiality, thus protecting against the risk of information being intercepted by an attacker,” according to the DSD’s Information Security Manual on which it based its testing.
The approval comes so long as the device is connected to a separately approved BlackBerry smartphone through the Bridge application.
Users can access content like their push emails, calendar and contacts through Bridge on their PlayBook, backed up by a host of class-leading encryption standards.
These include support for ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography) and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) according to RIM.
The move gives RIM a one-up against Apple as it gains the security rating ahead of the popular iPad that leads the tablet market. The iPad has similarly been shunned by the Russian government in favour of the PlayBook according to the RBK Daily.
