COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The National Security Agency has specified elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) for a wide range of key agreement and digital signature tasks.

The decision boosts the fortunes of ECC originator Certicom Corp. (Missisauga, Ontario). The announcement follows NSA's licensing of Certicom algorithms last fall for a program in which NSA will actively work with suppliers of secure modules for government applications.

The spy agency's support of ECC protocols represents an interesting turn in NSA's continued analysis of private- and public-key crypto systems. Previously, NSA had opposed wide industry use of public-key crypto. The agency influenced the design of the original private-key Data Encryption Standard, and tried to push companies toward use of the agency-developed Clipper/Capstone crypto-chip program.