Everything about Secure Computing totally explained
Secure Computing Corporation, or
SCC, is a
public company that develops and sells
computer security products, such as:
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 didn't 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
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.
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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Secure Computing'.
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