BlackBerry Launches IoT Device Security Offering

TORONTO (Reuters) – BlackBerry Ltd said on Tuesday it is launching a new certification service that will help bring smartphone-like security to a range of devices, from cars to smart meters. Certicom, a BlackBerry subsidiary and industry pioneer in elliptic curve cryptography, announced the new offering that it said would secure millions of devices that are expected to be part of the growing Internet of Things (IoT) sphere. The company said it had already won a contract in the U.K. to issue certificates for the smart meter initiative, which covers more than 104 million smart meters and home energy management devices. The service will make it much easier for companies deploying such devices to authenticate and secure them, the company said. Separately, BlackBerry also outlined a plan to expand its research and development efforts into innovation and improving computer security. The initiative is called the BlackBerry Center for High Assurance Computing Excellence (CHACE). The increased security of networks and devices has become a huge target for large North American corporations in the face of costly and damaging security breaches. U.S. retailer Target Corp. is still recovering from a major breach in 2013 in which 40 million payment card numbers and 70 million other pieces of customer data, such as email addresses and phone numbers, were stolen. Michaels Stores, the largest U.S. arts and crafts retailer, said last year that it had suffered a security breach that may have affected about 2.6 million payment cards. BlackBerry said the fail-then-patch approach to managing security risk has become a widely accepted practice, but through CHACE, it plans to develop tools and techniques that will provide a much higher level of protection than is currently available. (Reporting by Euan Rocha; Editing by Grant McCool)