April 10, 2007 – nCipher plc (LSE: NCH), a global leader in protecting critical enterprise data, announces it has partnered with Certicom Corp. (TSX: CIC) to offer the first commercially available hardware-based cryptographic Security platform for implementing Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based on Elliptic Curve Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (ECMQV). ECC is now recommended by the U.S. Government and is increasingly being adopted by industry and commerce to deliver high levels of security for protecting critical data.

By bringing together Certicom's Suite B Power Bundle of software tools for ECC with nCipher's tamper-resistant FIPS 140-2 validated hardware security modules (HSMs), customers can rapidly comply with the U.S. Government's Suite B recommendations for advanced cryptographic algorithms. Suite B recommendations were defined by The National Security Agency (NSA) in 2005 to define best practice security with new public key cryptosystems for protecting classified and unclassified government communications and are also widely referenced throughout industry.

ECC is an important algorithm within Suite B due to its computational efficiency arising from the fact that it utilizes much smaller key sizes compared with conventional public key encryption systems for a given level of security. This delivers faster processing with lower power consumption making it ideal for demanding enterprise security applications, potentially reducing the number of servers required and freeing up valuable data center resources. As with any system employing cryptographic security it is deployment best practice to use HSMs to protect keys from theft and misuse. As a result of this partnership organizations can now satisfy both goals – adoption of the latest encryption and signing techniques all within a secure, tamper-resistant and easily managed environment. Furthermore, nCipher's HSMs are also the only devices on the market to provide an acceleration capability for ECC, enabling system capacity to be increased even further, once again maximizing efficiency and reducing deployment costs.

Suite B is a set of cryptographic algorithms provided by the NSA to be used for hashing, digital signatures, key exchange and encryption. nCipher HSMs provide support for Suite B Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) for key exchange and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) for digital signatures. nCipher will be the first HSM vendor to support the advanced Elliptic Curve Menezes-Qu-Vanstone (ECMQV) algorithm, a more efficient signed key exchange mechanism developed at Certicom. This support for ECC together with existing support for AES and Secure Hash Algorithms SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512 makes nCipher HSMs the first hardware available to offer key management and acceleration for all Suite B algorithms.