Winnie the Pooh Exiled From the BlackBerry (And Tigger Too!)



The Hundred Acre Wood is a great place to find honey or plan a surprise birthday party, but it's a terrible source of passwords. Or so says BlackBerry maker Research in Motion.

Earlier this week, the website Rapid Berry dug into the BlackBerry 10 internals and discovered a list of 106 passwords that cannot be used with a BlackBerry ID – that's the username and password combination that BlackBerry users must come up with in order to download apps and move data from device to device.

Banning easy-to-guess passwords like 123456 might be good for users, but RIM's list is so arbitrary that it borders on comical. For example, hockey, soccer, baseball and football are all banned words. But golf, tennis, and polo are all fine. It looks an awful lot like Canadian sports elitism.

As the Toronto Star pointed out on reviewing the banned words, it includes common terms such as "internet" and "password" as well as "most of the characters from A.A. Milne’s 'World of Pooh.'"

Well, not really. Kanga, Roo, Rabbit, Owl and Christopher Robin do not make the list. It looks an awful lot like an extreme bias against particular parts of the Hundred Acre Wood.

Not true, says Alex Manea, RIM's manager of services security. "We love Winnie the Pooh."

The list taken from a secret collection of commonly used passwords that has circulated somehow in the security community. Manea can't reveal who compiled it, but he says it was then enhanced with a few BlackBerry-specific terms such as "blackberry" and "blackberryid."

"This is just a small part of our larger security solution," he says.

Security vendor TrustWave called the whole thing a "token measure that does little to increase security and likely a lot to frustrate users."

"Instead of blacklisting a few words, a more secure option would be to enforce some basic password complexity requirement," the company said in an e-mailed statement. "Also, consider now there is a list of 106 known unusable passwords that someone malicious needn't bother trying."

Photo: Flickr/Tanakawho*