D&M Holdings Licenses Certicom Intellectual Property

Consumer electronics leader uses Certicom's ECC technology to protect digital audio and video

MISSISSAUGA, Ontario – (September 13, 2005)– Certicom Corp. (TSX: CIC) today announced that Japan-based D&M Holdings, Inc, maker of the popular Denon, Marantz, McIntosh, and ReplayTV brands, licensed Certicom elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) intellectual property to implement the digital rights management (DRM) standard, DTCP, in many of its products. DTCP (Digital Transmission Content Protection), which protects digital video and audio interfaces on consumer electronic devices, uses ECC for authentication and key agreement.

Digital interfaces on consumer electronic devices eliminate the need for analog conversion and pave the way for interoperability between consumer electronic and personal computers in the home. While this new approach offers higher quality content, there is a risk that perfect digital copies of content could be created if the interfaces are not protected.

To counter this risk, the industry has introduced DTCP as a DRM standard to protect digital audio and video content as it moves from device to device. Today DTCP is primarily used for Firewire interfaces but is expected to extend to USB and wireless digital interfaces. Certicom's security technologies, used for authentication and key agreement, help to protect audio/video content from illegal copying, and tampering.

"Consumer electronic companies are under pressure from content providers to protect digital content. Consequently, this is an emerging market with great potential for ECC and Certicom," said Ian McKinnon, president and CEO of Certicom. "The agreement with D&M Holdings is a key milestone in our strategy to continue to expand into the consumer electronics market, particularly in Asia. As this industry moves more of its content to digital, we can expect to see a greater demand for Certicom and our ECC expertise."

ECC is a computationally efficient form of cryptography that offers equivalent security to other competing technologies but with much smaller key sizes. This results in faster computations, lower power consumption, as well as memory and bandwidth savings, thereby making it ideal for today's resource-constrained environments of consumer electronics. Certicom's patent portfolio covers many key aspects of cryptography and ECC in particular, including software optimizations, efficient hardware implementations, methods to enhance the security, and various cryptographic protocols.

D&M Holdings has licensed ECC-based patents and patents pending, and will pay Certicom royalties on product shipment over the life of the patents.

About Certicom
Certicom protects the value of your content, software and devices with government-approved security. Adopted by the National Security Agency (NSA) for classified and sensitive but unclassified government communications, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) provides the most security per bit of any known public-key scheme. As the undisputed leader in ECC, Certicom security offerings are currently licensed to more than 300 customers including General Dynamics, Motorola, Oracle, Research In Motion and Unisys. Founded in 1985, Certicom's corporate offices are in Mississauga, ON, Canada with worldwide sales headquarters in Reston, VA and offices in the US, Canada and Europe. Visit www.certicom.com