The BlackBerry® Enterprise Solution uses a two-key Triple DES encryption algorithm to create message keys and master encryption keys. In each of three iterations of the DES algorithm, the first of two 56-bit keys in outer CBC mode encrypts the data, the second key decrypts the data, and then the first key encrypts the data again. For more information, see Federal Information Processing Standard - FIPS PUB 81 [3].

The BlackBerry Enterprise Solution stores the message keys and master encryption keys as 128-bit long binary strings, with each parity bit in the least significant bit of each of the 8 bytes of key data. The message keys and master encryption keys have overall key lengths of 112 bits and include 16 bits of parity data.