John Pescatore

Information Week reports that RIM, the Blackberry company, has made a $53M unsolicited offer to buy Certicom, the original mover and shaker behind elliptic curve cryptography.  With all the recent attention on “Can President Obama ever use a Blackberry again?” it makes a lot of sense for RIM to stay ahead of the curve and own technology to build the strongest possible encryption into its devices. Owning the technology is probably a good thing, but obviously there are likely many competitors who would then look elsewhere for ECC toolkits and the like – but RIM isn’t doing this for the revenue.

This is another example of what Gartner has been calling “Public Key Operations” as opposed to Public Key Infrastructure. There is a lot of PKO – key management baked into applications and processes  - and not a whole lot of PKI going on. That’s a good thing – it means encryption and signing capabilities are getting baked in and looking a lot more like the rest of the Internet-driven world: distributed and out of control but affordable and useful, compared to centrally controlled, expensive and useless. That lack of control brings different challenges, but it moves the challenges to managing the use of encryption vs. seeing the challenges of deployment leading to encryption never being used.

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