Certicom announced that Research In Motion (RIM) has licensed the Security Builder Crypto toolkit and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based intellectual property from Certicom. This agreement allows RIM to extend its existing ECC-based security from Certicom in its BlackBerry offerings.

ECC provides the most security per bit of any known public-key scheme. This results in faster computations, lower power consumption, as well as memory and bandwidth savings. Last year, the National Security Agency (NSA) purchased extensive licensing rights to Certicom's ECC-based intellectual property, validating ECC's strength and leading the way to future adoption.

Under the agreement, RIM will pay a one-time US$3.5 million Intellectual Property license fee, entitling them to deploy a fixed number of seats. The agreement provides for additional revenue through royalties once RIM exceeds the prepaid number of seats. Certicom will be recognizing the license revenue over three years starting in the first quarter of fiscal 2005 which begins on 1 May 2004.