In a recent press release, BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) officially announced its new service of providing security certificates through Certicom, a subsidiary of the company. This service provides key public infrastructure certificate to connected devices. The certificates will be managed by Certicom. The company calls the service “cost effective” and hopes to help device manufacturers and service providers.
The company had issued security certificates in the smart meter initiative in the United Kingdom last week. The company claims to have designed this managed certificate service to cater for millions of connected devices in the near future. The service will allow users to concentrate more on their business while relying on world class certificate management of the company.
To date, the company has issued nearly 60 million certificates to smart meters. These certificates comply with ZigBee Smart Energy specifications. Ryan Maley, Strategic Marketing Director at ZigBee Alliance commented that Certicom’s certificate service allows service providers to give enterprise-grade security.
Certicom uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to secure its certificates. This gives advanced protection to applications. The certificates are available for device manufacturers and service providers who use BlackBerry IoT platform. Other users can also avail the service at this stage. The users have option to use Elliptic Curve, hybrid or RSA based device certificates. The Elliptic Curve Cryptography is said to have the highest security per bit among all known public key schemes. Jim Alfred from BlackBerry Technology solutions commented about the technology used by Certicom. He said that strong cryptography and entity authentication are at heart of Internet of Things (IoT) security.
Security is the most important issue while managing remote devices as users must establish a secure network while connecting to these devices.
BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) seems to have taken keen interest in the field of cyber security. The company was recently selected by the United States Navy to provide BlackBerry 10 platform for military purposes. The company also opened up a new center to cater for high assurance computing. With these continuous efforts, the company is sure to move forward in the cyber security market.
