Elliptic Semiconductor Algorithms NIST Certified to FIPS140-2

Ottawa, Canada -- February 13, 2007 - Security semiconductor IP provider Elliptic Semiconductor today announced that it had achieved the broadest Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) validation among its competitors. The FIPS standard was developed by the United States National Institute of Science and Technology to ensure that products acquired by federal agencies meet stringent standards for cryptography. The program ensures that a product or algorithm submitted for certification has passed rigorous testing under either the CAVP (Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program) or CMVP (Cryptographic Module Validation Program) by a third party lab approved by NIST.

The most important certification for the government market is FIPS 140-2, because FIPS 140-2 validation is required for the sale or licensing of products implementing cryptography to the United States federal government. The validation is also leveraged by companies acquiring security products outside the U.S. government as a certification indicates that a rigorous, third party verification of the algorithm or module has been done.

Elliptic designs and licenses cryptographic designs in semiconductor IP form which are licensed to Elliptic customers for integration into the integrated circuits. As such, Elliptic has received certification for its algorithms under CAVP. Further details on the certificates granted to Elliptic by NIST are found through the following links:

• AES -ECB (e/d; 128,192,256);-CBC (e/d; 128,192,256); -CTR (ext; 128,192,256)
• 3DES -ECB (e/d; KO 1,2,3); -CBC (e/d; KO 1,2,3)
• SHA-1; SHA-224; SHA-256; SHA-384; SHA-512
• HMAC-SHA1; HMAC-SHA224; HMAC-SHA256; HMAC-SHA384; HMAC-SHA512

"Elliptic is committed to delivering the highest quality, fully certified semiconductor IP and middleware to its customers." said Al Hawtin, VP of Marketing and Business Development. "The FIPS validation the company has received represents another step in a continuous process of quality improvement aimed at ensuring our customers receive fully verified products as now confirmed by the rigorous testing of a third party lab."

About Elliptic Semiconductor
Headquartered in Ottawa, Elliptic Semiconductor Inc. provides semiconductor intellectual property (IP) cores and software for secure communications ranging from low power to multi-gigabit per second implementations. Elliptic SIP cores enable system-on-chip designers to efficiently balance power, performance and silicon area in complex security-based systems. Demanding customers in markets such as implantable devices, wireless, storage, digital rights management (DRM), RFID and high performance communications trust Elliptic IP cores.