Secure Computing

Infobox_Company
company_name = Secure Computing Corporation
company_
company_type = Public (NASDAQ: [http://quotes.nasdaq.com/asp/SummaryQuote.asp?symbol=SCUR&selected=SCUR SCUR] )
company_slogan = Securing connections between people, applications, and networks
foundation = 1989 (spun off from Honeywell)
location = San Jose, California
key_people = Dan Ryan, President, CEO Richard Scott, Chairman | num_employees = ~1000 (2007)
industry = Security software and services
products = Security appliances and hosted services
revenue = $237.9 million USD (2007)
homepage = [http://www.securecomputing.com www.securecomputing.com]

Secure Computing Corporation, or SCC, is a public company (nasdaq|SCUR) that develops and sells computer security appliances and hosted services that protect users and data. The company has developed filtering systems used by governments such as Iran and Saudi Arabia that block their citizens from accessing information on the Internet. [http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/columnists/jlanders/stories/041105dnbusworldview.4eb29.html Snuffing out Net's benefit to democracy] , Jim Landers, "Dallas Morning News", December 20, 2005; accessed September 20, 2008.] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4123788.stm Iran targets dissent on the net] Clark Boyd, "BBC.com", June 24, 2005; accessed September 20, 2008.] On September 22nd, 2008 Mcafee announced it reached agreement to acquire the company.

Company history

In 1984, a research group called the Secure Computing Technology Center (SCTC) was formed at Honeywell in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The centerpiece of SCTC was its work on security-evaluated operating systems for the NSA. This work included the Secure Ada Target (SAT) and the Logical Coprocessing Kernel (LOCK), both designed to meet the stringent A1 level of the Trusted Computer Systems Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC).

In the late 1980s, Honeywell negotiated the sale of its computing activities to Groupe Bull. However, the LOCK program was in progress at that time, and the NSA did not want it operated by a foreign corporation. Instead of being sold to Groupe Bull, Honeywell's SCTC organization was spun off in 1989 to produce Secure Computing Technology Corporation, and moved to nearby Roseville, Minnesota. After a couple of years, the word "Technology" was dropped from the company name.

Secure Computing morphed itself from a small defense contractor into a commercial product vendor over the next several years. This was largely driven by the investment community, which was much less interested in purchasing security goods from defense contractors than from commercial product vendors, especially vendors in the growing Internet space.

Secure Computing became a publicly traded company in 1995. Following the pattern of other Internet-related startups, the stock price tripled its first day: it opened at $16 a share and closed at $48. The price peaked around $64 in the next several weeks and then collapsed over the following year or so. It has ranged roughly between $3 and $20 ever since.

The company headquarters were moved to San Jose, California in 1998, though the bulk of the workforce remained in the Twin Cities. The Roseville employees completed a move to St. Paul, Minnesota in February 2006. Several other sites now exist, largely the result of mergers (described below).

Mergers and acquisitions

Secure Computing consists of several merged units, one of the oldest being Enigma Logic, Inc., which was started around 1982. Bob Bosen, the founder, claims to have created the first security token to provide challenge-response authentication. Bosen published a computer game for the TRS-80 home computer in 1979, called "80 Space Raiders", that used a simple challenge response mechanism for copy protection. People who used the mechanism encouraged him to repackage it for remote authentication. Bosen started Enigma Logic to do so, and filed for patents in 1982–3; a patent was issued in the United Kingdom in 1986. Ultimately, the "challenge" portion of the challenge response was eliminated to produce a one-time password token similar to the SecurID product.

Enigma Logic merged with Secure Computing Corporation in 1996.

Secure Computing acquired the SmartFilter product line by purchasing a small company producing the Webster Webtrack product in the mid-1990s after going public. The acquisition included the domain name [http://www.webster.com/ webster.com] which was eventually sold to the publishers of Webster's Dictionary.

Shortly after acquiring the Webster/SmartFilter product, Secure Computing merged with Border Technologies, a Canadian company selling the Borderware firewall. Border Technologies boasted an excellent product and a highly developed set of sales channels; some said that the sales channels were a major inducement for the merger. Although the plan was to completely merge the Borderware product with Sidewinder, and to offer a single product to existing users of both products, this never quite succeeded. Ultimately, the Borderware product was sold to a consortium of Borderware users.

By this time, the mergers yielded a highly distributed company with an office in Minnesota, Florida, California, and two or three in Ontario. This proved unwieldy, and the company scaled back to offices in Minnesota and California.

In 2002, the company took over the Gauntlet Firewall product from Network Associates.

In 2003, Secure Computing acquired N2H2, the makers of the Bess web filtering package. There has been some consolidation of Bess and SmartFilter, and Bess is now referred to as "Smartfilter, Bess edition" in company literature.

A merger with CyberGuard was announced in August 2005 and approved in January 2006 (A year earlier, CyberGuard had attempted to acquire Secure Computing, but the proposal had been rejected). The largest merger by Secure Computing as of this time, it has resulted in the addition of several product lines to the company, including three classes of firewalls, content and protocol filtering systems, and an enterprise-wide management system for controlling all of those products. Several offices were also added, including CyberGuard's main facility in Deerfield Beach, Florida, as well as Webwasher development office in Paderborn, Germany, and a SnapGear development office in Brisbane, Australia.

In 2006, the company acquired Atlanta-based CipherTrust, a developer of email security solutions. The acquisition was announced in July 2006 and completed in August 2006.

On July 30, 2008, Secure Computing announced its intention to sell the SafeWord authentication product line to Alladin Knowledge Systems, leaving the company with a business focused on web/mail security and firewalls.

On September 22, 2008, McAfee announced its intention to acquire Secure Computing. The combined company will form the world's largest dedicated security company.

Use of company products for governmental censorship

The OpenNet Initiative studied filtering software used by governments to block access by their citizens and found Secure Computing's SmartFilter program heavily used by both the Iranian and Saudi governments. According to Secure Computing, any use of its software in Iran is without its consent—U.S. sanctions prohibit American companies from any dealings with Iran—and in 2005 the company said it is actively working to stop its illegal use. [http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn7589 Iranian net censorship powered by US technology] , Will Knight, "New Scientist", June 27, 2005; accessed September 20, 2008.] [http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/trends/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=172301283 Secure Computing Tries to Block Illegal Downloads in Iran] , K.C. Jones, "InformationWeek", October 14, 2005; accessed September 20, 2008>.]

In response to the company, Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, stated, " [T] he fact remains that the software has been in use for an extended period of time there. And we've seen Secure Computing software turn up in more than just Iran. We've seen it in Saudi Arabia as well."

In 2001 "The New York Times" reported that Secure Computing was one of ten companies competing for the Saudi government's contract for software to block its citizens access to websites it deemed offensive. [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DEFDC103BF93AA25752C1A9679C8B63 Companies Compete to Provide Internet Veil for the Saudis] , Jennifer 8. Lee, November 19, 2001; accessed September 20, 2008.] The company already had a deal with the Saudis that was due to expire in 2003. In its defense, Secure Computing has always stated that it can not control how customers use a product once it has been sold. According to the OpenNet Initiative's 2007 report, the Saudi government's censorhsip "most extensively covers religious and social content, though sites relating to opposition groups and regional political and human rights issues are also targeted." [http://opennet.net/research/profiles/saudi-arabia Saudi Arabia country profile] , OpenNet Initiative, May 10, 2007; accessed September 20, 2008.]

TrustedSource reputation system

TrustedSource, a reputation system that Secure Computing obtained as part of the CipherTrust acquisition, has become a key technology to the company, enabling all product lines with global intelligence capability based on behavioral analysis of traffic patterns from all of company's email, web and firewall devices and hosted services, as well as those of numerous OEM partners. TrustedSource derives real-time reputation scores of IPs, URLs, domains, and mail/web content based on a variety of data mining/analysis techniques, such as Support Vector Machine, Random forest, and Term-Frequency Inverse-Document Frequency (TFIDF) classifiers.

Web Security products

The company's flagship web security product line is the Secure Web appliance (formerly known as Webwasher). It provides Anti-Malware protection, TrustedSource reputation-enabled URL filtering controls, content caching and SSL scanning capabilities.

In June 2008, Secure Computing launched Secure Web Protection Service, an in-the-cloud hosted web security service that provides a similar set of features to the Secure Web appliance, without requiring any on-premise equipment or software.

Mail Security products

The company's flagship email security product line is the Secure Mail appliance (formerly known as IronMail). It provides TrustedSource reputation-enabled anti-spam, data-leakage protection (DLP), encryption and anti-malware capabilities.

ecure Firewalls

The company's flagship firewall product is called Secure Firewall (formerly known as Sidewinder). Over the years, Secure Computing has offered the following major lines of firewall products:

* Secure Firewall (Sidewinder) – based on SecureOS, the company's derivative of FreeBSD (previously BSD/OS)
* Secure Firewall Reporter
* Secure Firewall CommandCenter
* CyberGuard
** Secure SnapGear – embedded system based on μClinux
** Classic – built on UnixWare
** TSP (Total Stream Protection) – built on Linux
* Borderware – sold off, as noted previously
* SecureZone – discontinued
* Firewall for NT – discontinued
* Gauntlet – built on Solaris, nearly phased out

The Sidewinder firewall incorporated technical features of the high-assurance LOCK system, including Type enforcement, a technology later applied in SELinux. However, interaction between Secure Computing and the open source community has been spotty due to the company's ownership of patents related to Type enforcement. The Sidewinder never really tried to achieve an A1 TCSEC rating, but it did earn an EAL-4+ Common Criteria rating.

Along with Sidewinder, Gauntlet had been one of the earliest application layer firewalls; both had developed a large customer base in the United States Department of Defense. Gauntlet was originally developed by Trusted Information Systems (TIS) as a commercial version of the "TIS Firewall Toolkit", an early open source firewall package developed under a DARPA contract.

External links

* [http://www.securecomputing.com/ Secure Computing Corporation web site]
*" [http://www.smat.us/crypto/docs/Lock-eff-acm.pdf Cost Profile of a Highly Assured, Secure Operating System] ", an overview of the LOCK system.
*" [http://www.byte.com/art/9601/sec12/art2.htm Is Your Network Secure?] ", an early "Byte" magazine article on the Sidewinder firewall.

References