Certicom Launches Intellectual Property Licensing Business

Certicom has presented a new growth strategy for its intellectual property (IP) licensing business that will extend Certicoms core business of embedded security to include the licensing of its extensive Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) patent portfolio.This new initiative enables Certicom to pursue IP licensing opportunities with organizations that require software or hardware implementations of strong, efficient cryptography. To date, Certicom has focused on developing key IP in the cryptographic field that are available in the companys security software. Certicom now plans to leverage this IP portfolio by investing in additional research, development, marketing, and sales of IP licenses. Currently, ECC is used in millions of devices worldwide as mandated by industry standards. The projected growth in ECC adoption can be attributed to an increased demand for embedding strong security in constrained devices across multiple market verticals. In addition to its current focus on the wireless and government sectors, Certicom will now target its software and IP licensing efforts to the semiconductor and consumer electronics industry. These new sectors are ideally suited for ECC adoption as many of the applications require a more efficient form of cryptography, like ECC, that offers equivalent security to other competing technologies but with much smaller key sizes.