"There's a constant need for them to seek alternative routes to build their encryption technology team. There's very sensitive information, whether it's across government or any firm that's supposed to sync with your contacts and the back end of things, like file sharing and such. It's a whole world that scares a lot of people out there."

If RIM bought Certicom, it might not have to apply ECC at the device level, Reith said. For enterprise customers, a lot of the security sits on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). There is also the network operations centre in a company, where security software is streamed through to the device.

"With the BlackBerry, usually (data) gets encrypted before it leaves the network operations centre, then gets re-encrypted when it gets to the BES, then a third time when it hits the device," he said.

There are some technologies already on the market that could overlay on top of a BlackBerry implementation that could meet the RS 232 telecommunications standard, Gruia said. RIM could also avoid the acquisition route altogether by partnering with a security company that could offer customers a similar level of encryption. Earlier this year, EMC's RSA division launched a two-factor authentication tool for the BlackBerry.

"It's not only Obama that they want," he said, referring to U.S. president-elect Barack Obama's reported loyalty to the BlackBerry within the American public sector. "There's the power systems industry, health care . . . there are lots of industries where you need to protect this kind of communication."