BlackBerry launches SecuSUITE for Government

BlackBerry Strengthens Cybersecurity Offering for the Canadian and U.S. Government

BlackBerry announced today the company has expanded its cybersecurity offerings for the public sector to now include SecuSUITE for Government, a multi-platform solution for end-to-end encryption of voice calls and text messages.

Part of BlackBerry Secure, the most secure and comprehensive platform to connect people, devices, processes and systems, SecuSUITE for Government is the only National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) certified voice solution supporting iOS, Android and BlackBerry 10 smartphones and tablets.

It is also BlackBerry´s first secure mobile voice product listed on both the NIAP Product Compliant List (PCL) and NSA Commercial Solutions for Classified Program (CSfC) List.

With SecuSUITE for Government, employees can be truly mobile and exchange secret and secure phone calls from their smartphones. Whether it’s economic prosperity, political stability or national security at stake, it’s a capability that can make all the difference.

In the past, to make encrypted calls, government employees would have to be sitting at their desks using a secure landline. In a mobile world where everything is time-sensitive, that’s just not viable anymore. With SecuSUITE for Government, employees can be truly mobile and make confidential and secure phone calls from their smartphones, whether it’s iOS, Android or BlackBerry, and even if they own the device (BYOD).

If secure communication technology is cumbersome or hard to use, employees may revert to making calls on unsecured lines, or give up the ability to make secure calls while out of the office. SecuSUITE for Government is intuitive and similar to the native dialer that employees use every day on their smartphones. This means users can focus on communicating instead of on learning a new way to make calls or send text messages.

SecuSUITE for Government is designed with efficiency in mind. All its encryption and authentication processes run seamlessly and securely in the background, without impacting on battery life, performance or usability. Making an encrypted mobile phone call is as painless as making a regular call, and has the crystal-clear voice quality you need and expect. Users are already authenticated, the certificate exchange takes place during call setup and the client is optimized to maintain its SIP connection, meaning users are always reachable.

“Call tapping is happening at an alarming rate,” said Alex Thurber, SVP and General Manager of Mobility Solutions, BlackBerry.

“In today’s connected world, restricting agency employees to only exchange classified information from the desk phone is no longer a viable option, but it could be the new reality if governments don’t start securing calls and texts from mobile devices. Our governments need to be mobile and they need their conversations secure, or more importantly, BlackBerry Secure.”

With the NIAP Common Criteria certification, SecuSUITE for Government can now help Federal agencies safeguard sensitive conversations against electronic eavesdropping. BlackBerry’s solution is hosted on premise, giving full control to the customer, something agencies want and need. It is highly reliable and delivers secure calls over carrier networks the same as secure calls over Wi-Fi, and because it works across all networks, there is no need to lock an organization into a single carrier.

To protect against evolving sophisticated cyber threats, SecuSUITE for Government is secured with strong data-in-transit (DIT) and data-at-rest (DAR) encryption. It can support dual layers of encryption across all data channels, complies with SUITE B cryptography requirements, supports FIPS 140-2 validated keystores and has obtained the following Common Criteria certifications based on NIAP Protection Profiles: