Secure Computing

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For the general concept, see computer security.
Secure Computing Corporation
Type Public (NASDAQ: SCUR)
Founded 1989 (spun off from Honeywell)
Headquarters San Jose, California
Key people John McNulty, President, Chairman, and CEO
Industry Security software and services
Products Security software
Revenue $93 million USD (2004)
Employees ~1000 (2007)
Website www.securecomputing.com

Secure Computing Corporation, or SCC, is a public company (NASDAQ: SCUR) that develops and sells computer security products, such as:

Contents

[edit] 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).

[edit] 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 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 Assocates.

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.

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

[edit] Firewalls

Over the years, Secure Computing has offered the following major lines of firewall products:

  • Sidewinder – based on SecureOS, the company's derivative of FreeBSD (previously BSD/OS)
  • CyberGuard
    • SG (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.

[edit] External links

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