RSA SecureID soft token: error reading sdtid file

So at work we are rolling out the newer BB OS 10.x devices. We use RSA keyfobs  and they have a software variant where-in you can load a software version of the keyfob in an app supplied by RSA. There are apps for iOS, Windows, Android, and BlackBerry OS so it’s a pretty good option. 

The way this works is that you create a file (ending with a .sdtid extension) which is the software keyfob (let’s call this a “soft token” from now on). You then import this into the app and it generates the changing codes. iOS, Windows, and Android have it easy in that there are RSA tools to convert this soft token to a QR code which you can simply scan and import this into the app. These OSes also don’t have the concept of separate spaces, so you the IT admin can easily email the soft token to your users and they can open & import it into the app. But BlackBerry users have a work  space and a personal space on their device, and corporate email is in the work space, so you can only import the token into the RSA app if it’s installed from the app store in the work space. 

Again, in practice that shouldn’t be an issue, but in our firm the RSA app isn’t appearing on the app store in the work space. The BES admins have published the app to the app store, yet it doesn’t appear. They are taking their sweet time troubleshooting, so I figured why not just install the app in the personal space and somehow get the soft token into that?

One option would be to create an email account in the personal space with the user’s private account and email the token to that. Too much effort! Another option would be to put it up on a website and access it via the personal space browser, then import. Yet another option would be to just plug in the device to the computer, copy the soft token to the micro SD card, and then import. The latter is what I decided to go with. 

Everything went well but when it came to importing some devices gave an error along the following lines: “error reading sdtid file”. Uninstalling re-installing the RSA app did the trick. I am not sure how that helped but my guess is when the app launches it asks for permissions to read your micro SD card etc, and am guessing when the user was presented with that he/ she ignored the prompt or denied the request. As a result the app couldn’t read the soft token from the micro SD card and threw the above error. That’s my guess at least.  In any case, uninstall re-install the app and that should do the trick! ;-) I found many forum posts with this question but none with a straight-forward answer so thought I should make a blog post in case it helps someone.