Trusted Information Systems

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Trusted Information Systems (TIS) was a computer security research and development organization during the 1980s and 1990s, performing computer security research for organizations such as NSA, DARPA, ARL, AFRL, SPAWAR, and others.

TIS was founded in 1983 by NSA veteran Steve Walker, and at various times employed several notable information security experts including David Elliott Bell, Martha Brandstad, Marv Schaefer, Steve Crocker, Marcus Ranum, Steve Lipner and Carl Ellison. TIS was headquartered in Glenwood, Maryland, in a surprisingly rural location; the company was started in Walker's garage, and as the company grew, rather than move to Baltimore or the Washington D.C. suburbs, a small office building was constructed on land next to Walker's house.

TIS projects included Trusted Xenix, the first commercially available B2 operating system; Trusted Mach, a research project that influenced DTOS and eventually SELinux; Domain and Type Enforcement (TE) which likewise influenced SELinux; the fwtk Firewall Toolkit (the first open source firewall software), which evolved into the Gauntlet Firewall, one of the first commercial firewall products; and a broad range of Internet Standards, including S/MIME, SNMP, DNS, DNSSEC, and many others.

The first whitehouse.gov e-mail server was located at their headquarters.

TIS's operating system work directly affected BSD/OS, which the Gauntlet Firewall was based on, as well as Linux, FreeBSD, and others.

The company went public in the late 1990s, and was acquired by Network Associates, which later became PGP and McAfee; TIS's final resting place appears to be SPARTA, Inc.'s ISSO division, where what remains of TIS Advanced Research and Engineering landed. TIS's primary commercial product, the Gauntlet Firewall, was acquired from Network Associates by Secure Computing Corporation (SCC), and is being integrated into their next generation Sidewinder Firewall. Several curious twists of fate had TIS acquired by NAI during its attempt to acquire PGP, which was also acquired by NAI; similarly, SCC and TIS were fierce business competitors at various points.

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