It would appear that RIM is planning to provide end-users with a mechanism to remember their passwords.  According to patent application 20090307498, RIM proposes to allow a user to store his password with unique version data to help him remember it later.  As per the patent application, the version data will be in the form of a date.  Thus, if the user forgets his password on the initial prompt and as long as he has not exceeded the maximum number of password attempts, he will receive a second prompt that says something like “The password that has been used is one from 3rd January 2009, please enter it to unlock the device.”  This can be helpful, but to someone like me who is awful with dates, it won’t help me much.  Here’s my initial take on the patent application.  Feel free to provide your views in either the comments or in the LinkedIn group – BlackBerry Security.

The thing that jumps out at me regarding this patent application is the fact that RIM is certainly becoming more consumer friendly.  In the country where I reside at the moment, one thing is apparent.  BlackBerries rule.  I have seen teenage girls in malls who have their faces buried in their BlackBerry.  I have also seen the regular business user owning not one but two.  It is easily the most popular phone sold here.  While corporates praise RIM for their security, consumers will not feel the same way.  In my brief, personal experience with alleged power-users, I came away feeling like no one really understood security at all.  This will most likely multiply with regular end-users.  So, in an effort not to appear too anal, RIM seems to have decided to provide a way for a user to remember his password.  Of course the patent refers to “unique version data” and remains fairly nebulous on what it can be.  In it’s patent application, RIM states that this unique data can be a date, integer or string.  It might be that the end-user will have the ability to configure an option like “prompt me with the 3rd and 8th character of my password”.  I know the maximum limit for incorrect passwords is no more than 10.  I still think it won’t be possible to guess a password in 10 attempts.  Thus this is quite a good move in helping make the device both secure and consumer-friendly.  I expect they will roll it out in one of their next OS updates.