Entrust Providing Trial Elliptic Curve Cryptography Certificates

DALLAS, May 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Always ahead of the curve, Entrust, Inc., wants to ensure greater adoption and use of an advanced security standard -- Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). To help promote the deployment and real-world use of ECC-based certificates, Entrust is offering complimentary samples of operational certificates and identities to innovative organizations.

"This is a unique opportunity for organizations to test and promote an advanced security standard," said Entrust President and CEO Bill Conner. "ECC certificates offer improved performance at equivalent security levels when compared to traditional cryptography standards like RSA. As such, it's important their use continues to grow."

In just three simple steps, organizations are able to test different types of ECC digital certificates, including SSL server certificates and S/MIME certificates.

Elliptic curve cryptography, or ECC, is a family of public-key algorithms that can provide shorter key lengths and, depending upon the operating platform and the applications for which they are used, may provide improved performance over systems based on integer factorization and discrete logarithms.

Although RSA is by far the most widely used public-key algorithm, it suffers serious performance impacts when key sizes increase much beyond those in common use today. For this reason, depending upon the characteristics of the operating environment, it is worthwhile considering switching to an algorithm with more favorable characteristics (e.g., ECC) at the security levels that will become common in years to come.

As cryptographic strength requirements increase, so do the sizes of signatures and public keys, and so does the time required to perform cryptographic operations on a particular computing platform. This rate of increase will be considerably faster for RSA than it is for ECC.

"Entrust fully supports the growth and innovation of ECC technology and all that it will enable," said Conner. "ECC will become a powerful tool as organizations require security standards that continue to protect for decades to come."

ECC certificates are compatible with the full suite of Entrust Authority PKI solutions.

Ready to experience Entrust ECC certificates? Visit entrust.net/ecc-demo for trial instructions, information and a complimentary ECC white paper.

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About Entrust

Entrust provides identity-based security solutions that empower enterprises, consumers, citizens and Web sites in more than 4,000 organizations spanning 60 countries. Entrust's identity-based approach offers the right balance between affordability, expertise and service. For strong authentication, fraud detection, digital certificates, SSL and PKI, call 888-690-2424, e-mail entrust@entrust.com or visit www.entrust.com.

Entrust is a registered trademark of Entrust, Inc. in the United States and certain other countries. In Canada, Entrust is a registered trademark of Entrust Limited. All Entrust product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of Entrust, Inc. or Entrust Limited. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.