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RIM expands use of Certicom's ECC crypto
May 06, 2004;
This time RIM is a license taker!

Certicom Licenses Intellectual Property to Research In Motion (RIM)

RIM expands use of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) in BlackBerry products

Certicom Corp., the authority for strong, efficient cryptography, announced that Research In Motion (RIM) has licensed the Security Builder(R) Crypto toolkit and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based intellectual property from Certicom. This agreement allows RIM to extend its existing ECC-based security from Certicom in its BlackBerry(R) offerings.

Implementing secure, wireless solutions is a top priority for most IT executives. BlackBerry has become popular in many government and enterprise organizations because it provides secure, integrated, push-based access to important communications and information. Since 2000, RIM has been using Certicom's Security Builder developer toolkits, and in particular its strong and efficient ECC libraries, to enhance security for the BlackBerry wireless platform.

ECC provides the most security per bit of any known public-key scheme. This results in faster computations, lower power consumption, as well as memory and bandwidth savings. Last year, the National Security Agency (NSA) purchased extensive licensing rights to Certicom's ECC-based intellectual property, validating ECC's strength and leading the way to future adoption.

"With more than one million subscribers, BlackBerry has become the wireless solution of choice for many enterprise and government organizations. Much of this success can be attributed to RIM's focus on efficient security that's extremely important to users," said Ian McKinnon, president and CEO of Certicom. "We are pleased to be licensing our security technology to RIM. This agreement represents another important validation of our ECC-based intellectual property."

Under the agreement, RIM will pay a one-time US$3.5 million intellectual property license fee, entitling them to deploy a fixed number of seats. The agreement provides for additional revenue through royalties once RIM exceeds the prepaid number of seats. Certicom will be recognizing the license revenue over three years starting in the first quarter of fiscal 2005 which begins on May 1, 2004.

For more information, visit www.rim.com.

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