BlackBerry introduced the BlackBerry Center for High Assurance Computing Excellence (CHACE), a new certificate service that will help bring security to mobile and IoT devices. CHACE will extend BlackBerry’s competencies in vulnerability prevention and enable the application of security research to real-world products and services.

"There’s a belief that the key to the world’s security issues is to patch faster, but this hamster wheel fails to address the root issue," said David Kleidermacher, Chief Security Officer, BlackBerry. "Systems that require regular patching always contain vulnerabilities unknown to developers, and some of these vulnerabilities are in fact known by would-be attackers. It’s clear we must build systems that are provably devoid of security flaws. The software and security engineering required to meet this objective is sadly rare today and must become commonplace. CHACE is BlackBerry’s initiative towards this goal, and we welcome all who wish to join the fight."

Key collaborators with CHACE include academic institutions as well as industry groups. For example, CHACE will collaborate with the healthcare community to address security and privacy concerns for next-generation wireless medical devices and applications.

Certicom, a subsidiary of BlackBerry and an industry pioneer in elliptic curve cryptography, announced a new offering that it contends will secure millions of devices, expected to be part of the growing Internet of Things (IoT) sphere.

The company said it has already won a contract in Britain to issue certificates for the smart meter initiative there with more than 104 million smart meters and home energy management devices.

The service will make it much easier for companies rolling out such devices to authenticate and secure them, the company said.

Organizations interested in joining CHACE can sign up for more information at www.BlackBerry.com/CHACE.