Companies' Collaboration Offers Industry's First Solution for Plug-and-Play Acceleration of Mass Volumes of ECC Transactions 

RSA CONFERENCE, SAN JOSE, Calif., February 20, 2002 - Certicom, (Nasdaq: CERT; TSE: CIC), a leading provider of mobile e-business security, today announced that the company has extended its license agreement with Motorola, Inc., (NYSE: MOT), to provide its market leading technology for a broad range of Motorola's award-winning semiconductor products. Certicom is also announcing their collaboration with Motorola in the development of the industry's first network security processor designed to process large volumes of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) transactions. Motorola's MPC190 network security processor leverages Certicom's ECC to achieve unparalleled speed and efficiency of higher volumes of wireless transactions without the need for additional hardware. 

"We were pleased to work with Certicom, a recognized leader in the security market, as we developed our MPC190 network security processor," stated Thomas Fehr, director of platform strategy for Motorola's Networking and Computing Systems Group. "Delivering easy integration with Motorola's broad array of communications processors, Motorola's family of security processors provides networking OEMs with a solution to add security functionality to their existing equipment - enabling a longer time-in-market for their designs. Thanks to our work with Certicom, Motorola's network security processors were the first on the market capable of accelerating Elliptic Curve mathematics - a feature especially important to the wireless communications market." 

Traditionally, companies that process large volumes of wireless transactions like those in the financial industry, have maintained performance and security by adding additional servers as demand increases. Using Certicom's Security Builder® cryptographic toolkit, the MPC190 chip was designed to transparently accelerate large volumes of ECC transactions allowing for over a dozen cryptographic operations to be done in parallel. Because the MPC190 can reside on the server infrastructure side, it is able to process these large volumes of ECC transactions without the use of additional servers. The universal Security Builder interface allows businesses to plug in this chip easily as their transaction demands increase regardless of their current security application, effectively lowering the ongoing operating cost. 

Motorola's MPC190 network security processor also provides leading-edge performance by facilitating the translation between ECC to RSA environments. The MPC190 is ideally suited for servers that run either ECC or a combination of ECC and RSA public key operations. Additionally, the chip optimizes high-speed performance by accelerating both symmetric key algorithms (DES, 3DES, and RC4) and authentication algorithms (SHA-1 and MD5). 

"We are very pleased to be announcing the expansion of our licensing agreement with Motorola to include their renowned semiconductor products," said Prakash Panjwani, senior vice president of business development. "The Motorola MPC190 security processor is a milestone in cryptographic processing that makes it possible for our large-scale customers to further reduce transaction-processing time without having to change their current security applications - a vital combination in today's economy." 

About Security Builder
Certicom's Security Builder is a standards-based cryptography toolkit that provides application developers with the sophisticated tools and flexibility needed to integrate encryption, digital signatures, and other security mechanisms into their applications. By using Certicom's ECC technology, battery, storage, and processing power limitations of current mobile devices are minimized, allowing proven desktop Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) security to be delivered straight to the mobile device. ECC, the industry's smallest, fastest, and most efficient security algorithm that is commercially standardized, is used by leading companies such as Motorola, Sony, Openwave, Palm, and RIM to provide advanced security for wireless devices, gateways, and content servers. 

About Certicom
Certicom is a leading provider of information security software and services, specializing in solutions for mobile e-business. The company's products and services are specifically designed to address the challenges imposed by a wireless data environment. Certicom's solutions incorporate its efficient encryption technology and are based on industry standards for information security that utilize public-key cryptography. Certicom's products are currently licensed to more than 200 customers including Cisco Systems, Inc., Handspring Inc., Motorola, Inc., Nortel Networks, Openwave Systems, Inc., Palm, Inc., QUALCOMM, Inc., Research In Motion Ltd., and Sony International (Europe) GmbH. Certicom's headquarters and worldwide sales and marketing operations are based in the Silicon Valley in Hayward. For more information, visit Certicom's Web site at http://www.certicom.com. 

Certicom, and Security Builder are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Certicom Corp. All other companies and products listed herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. 

Except for historical information contained herein, this press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially. Factors that might cause a difference include, but are not limited to, those relating to the acceptance of mobile and wireless devices and the continued growth of e-commerce and m-commerce, the increase of the demand for mutual authentication in m-commerce transactions, the acceptance of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) technology as an industry standard, the market acceptance of our principal products and sales of our customer's products, the impact of competitive products and technologies, the possibility of our products infringing patents and other intellectual property of fourth parties, and costs of product development. Certicom will not update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. More detailed information about potential factors that could affect Certicom's financial results is included in the documents Certicom files from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission and Canadian securities regulatory authorities. 

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