PGP Acquired From NAI

lowy writes "PGP Corporation, the 'new company with a long history' today announced that it has received $14 Million in funding and acquired the PGP Desktop and Wireless encryption product lines from Network Associates, Inc." PGP Corporation issued five press releases today, but we'll forgive it because it actually has products to sell, promises to keep offering a freeware version, and is taking on tech support for existing customers. Also, the email from NAI to its customers follows.

August 19, 2002

Dear Customer,

Today we are pleased to announce that PGP Corporation, a newly formed, venture-funded security company, has acquired the PGP desktop encryption and wireless product lines from Network Associates. As you know, prior to placing the products into maintenance mode, we were actively looking for a buyer that would continue the development and support of the technology.

Network Associates has retained products developed using PGPsdk including McAfee E-Business Server for encrypted server-to-server file transfer, McAfee Desktop Firewall and McAfee VPN Client. These products will remain a part of Network Associates existing product portfolio and we will continue to develop them to meet your security needs. PGP Corporation has acquired PGPmail, PGPfile, PGPdisk, PGPwireless, PGPadmin and PGPkeyserver encryption software products for Win32 and Macintosh, PGPsdk encryption software development kit, and PGP Corporate Desktop for Macintosh.

In addition to the technology, PGP Corporation has acquired all worldwide customer license agreements and technical support obligations. To ensure a seamless transition, Network Associates will work with PGP Corporation to support PGP customers through October 26, 2002. PGP Corporation will contact you shortly with details on its plans and product direction.

We trust that you will have continued success with the PGP desktop and wireless encryption products through PGP Corporation. Network Associates appreciates your business and we value our continued relationship across our remaining product lines.

Comments

Re:Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

You will! Read the announcement.

Check GnuPG, an excellent alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gnupg.org/

Re:Check GnuPG, an excellent alternative

[sllort]

Please note that GnuPG is not a full replacement for PGP, it does not contain the following features:

• Run-time filesystem encryption (encrypted fs)
  
• Firewall
  
• IDS
  
• IPSEC Tunneling VPN
  

It does have some email encryption abilities however, so if that is your intended purpose, go to it. It's Free as in Speech!

KWTCMA

Re:Mac OS X

[jht]

Yep, we will. They've announced that PGP 8.0 for OS X will be available within a couple of months, and it's fully Cocoa based. It'll include plug-ins for Apple Mail and Entourage, and it'll have a version of PGP Disk that'll work with older images and run in OS X.

There's also going to be new Personal versions of all the apps, as well. PGP Net will be a separate application under OS X, rather than being bundled in the base product. The Windows PGP VPN product will continue to be sold by NAI.

(Of course, had they posted this when I submitted it 3 hours ago, you would have known this already...)

Re:who funded it

[Majin Bubu]

Check http://www.pgp.com/display.php?pageID=51#anch23
T he new company has Zimmermann and Schneier in the technical board of advisors. One can hope.

Re:Awesome

[Mascot]

So.. Why not just install XP then PGP? I've been using PGP 6.5.8 since XP release and it works just dandy. The OE plugin is a bit shaky but it does work. Encrypted volumes (mounted files) works flawless.

Isn't that a bit deceptive?

[Bruce Perens]

GnuPG is intended to replace the PGP encryption program, not the entire PGP product line. Of course, there are Free Software replacements for those other products as well:

• Encrypted filesystem: GPL driver for Linux
• Firewall: Linux Router Project and others.
• IDS: Snort and its ilk.
• IPSEC tunneling VPN: I think this is in Free S/WAN.

Bruce

Re:Isn't that a bit deceptive?

[Bruce Perens]

OK, sorry to jump upon you, but the confusion of a product and the product line sounded too much like market-speak for me.

If your criteria include a Windows implementation, we're not going to meet them very often - we are more interested in other platforms. But in the case of the router, that's certainly an advantage. I cringe at the thought of someone hosting their firewall on the Windows OS.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Command line version?

[Llanfairpwllgwyngyll]

The PGP 7.x command line tools were removed because of the ease with which you could hack together a server using the command line tools without paying for a PGP Server-stylee licence which cost a lot more. The E-biz stuff still gave you the command line versions - but that was more expensive.

Re:Check GnuPG, an excellent subset

[matts.nu]

Yes, an IDS, a firewall, an encrypted email client, and an encrypted filesystem

Have you actually tried running them together? Like configuring PGPfire to block everything that wasn't authenticated in PGPvpn. You can't do it. There is no interaction between PGPvpn and PGPfire.

SSH Sentinel isn't sold as a firewall, just a VPN solution, but it allows you to block any traffic that you don't have a VPN definition for. I'll take SSH any day over PGP, and it's also free for non commercial use.

Re:Awesome

[Zeinfeld]

The question is, how long until the XP version of PGP is released? PGP has been my "killer app" for sticking with Win2k - how can you own a notebook computer without an encrypted filesystem?

Windows XP Professional includes an encrypted file system. Have you considered using that?

Outlook, Netscape, Notes etc. all support S/MIME encryption and signature, so adding PGP is not adding crypto capability, it is adding a particular crypto protocol. Now you may argue that you prefer the PGP implementation of that functionality but don't raise a preference to the level of a requirement unless you want to risk that when you give the world a choice of PGP or nothing that they go off and choose nothing.

The problem we have in the industry is that PGP/X.509 has become a Betamax/VHS battle. The costs of incompatibility are much greater than the specific benefits of either protocol.

The reason that PGP Inc mk I failled commercially is that they were pushing Betamax while the rest of the industry had standardized on X.509v3 with cross certificate extensions to provide Web of trust type capability.

There was also a good deal of personal animosity between some of the principals of the X.509 and PGP worlds. At this point however the industry is pretty much been driven by a different group of people and the standards issue has moved beyond the certificate format question. The XKMS protocol is designed specifically so that the client does not need to know whether the underlying PKI is PGP, S/MIME or whatever based.