Securing a President’s Blackberry
There were many speculation of whether President Barrack Obama will get to continue to use his Blackberry or to ditch it and replaced with General Dynamics Sectra Edge smart-phone.
Since we all know now that Blackberry was retained to be the preferred messaging tool, what is the technology behind used to ensure that the communication is highly secure?
Curiously, in the same week, a piece of news that Verisign bought Certicom was published by eWeek and at the bottom of the article mentioned and I quote below.
“Certicom manages and secures the value of content, applications and devices with government-approved security. Adopted by the NSA (National Security Agency) for government communications, Certicom’s elliptic curve cryptography provides the most security per bit of any known public-key scheme.”
Elliptic curve cryptography or ECC is the alternative to the more popular RSA that is use to secure a PKI infrastructure and Certicom has improved the technology to an extend such that performance is no longer really an issue, thus, adopting it becomes easier.
So each email sent by the President is now probably digitally signed with ECC to ensure it’s authentic and further encrypted by AES. Furthremore, an attempt to crack a Level-2 ECC algorithm “are believed to be computationally infeasible” according to Certicom ECC Challenge page.
Interestingly, Certicom share price shot up 40% on the news of being bought by Verisign.
