nCipher Partners with Certicom to Support Elliptic Curve Cryptography
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nCipher HSMs first to offer complete support for all Suite B algorithms and acceleration for ECC
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.
"ECC security technology meets the increasingly demanding requirements of not just the U.S. Government but of public and private sector organizations around the world," said Bernard Crotty, president and CEO of Certicom. "The nCipher partnership provides our customers with a range of deployment options allowing them to develop end-to-end ECC solutions with the highest performance implementations available and hardware protection from the most trusted name in the market."
"The sustained and rapid advance of information technology increasingly relies on the use of cryptography. With the increased prominence and adoption of ECC organizations now have greater choice in planning their deployment strategy," says Dr Nicko van Someren, chief technology officer at nCipher. "Our customers now have access to the highest levels of hardware protection and the most advanced key management tools available for the complete set of Suite B algorithms. The combination of our ECC-enabled HSMs with Certicom's Suite B Power Bundle of software tools ensures that customers get the most efficient and secure implementation of ECC available."
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.
