Expertcity Licenses Elliptic Curve Cryptography from Certicom

Expertcity customers, who use the Internet to access their desktops, demand strong security. For that reason, Expertcity decided to integrate the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Testing (NIST). Expertcity also wanted access to highly-efficient public key cryptography for use in key exchange and authentication protocols. They chose Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Certicoms developer toolkits for its proven implementations. In addition, Expertcity is using the Secure Remote Password (SRP) protocol, found within Certicoms Security Builder SSL toolkit. SRP is a password authentication and key-exchange protocol developed at Stanford University that is suitable for negotiating secure connections using user-supplied passwords. SRP addresses many of the problems traditionally associated with the use of user-friendly passwords. Several factors precipitated Expertcitys decision to work with Certicom. First, Expertcity needed a cryptosystem with small key sizes that was optimized for constrained devices. Second, they needed a system that could support multiple platforms and would allow them to apply a common code base. Third, they wanted a partner whose core expertise is security and who would provide ongoing support and maintenance. Certicom met all of those requirements. Security Builder Crypto has the most efficient implementations of ECC, which provides smaller key sizes with the highest strength-per-bit of any known public key today. As AES becomes more widely adopted, efficient public key cryptography becomes an increasingly important consideration to ensure the exchange of keys is equally secure. Security Builder Crypto also includes additional optimizations for standards-based algorithms, FIPS-validated algorithms and support for more than 30 platforms.