Slashdot Mirror
PGP Acquired From NAI
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.
You will! Read the announcement.
http://www.gnupg.org/
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...)
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
it only benefits...the corporate/home MS windows user's really.
So basically PGP only benefits 90% of the Marketplace? As far as being clueful goes, I consider myself to have a clue, and I use PGP instead of GPG because of the extra functionality - seamless integration with email clients, built in firewall, built in IDS, and an encrypted filesystem that integrates seamlessly into the filesystem. How exactly can you secure applications with files spread all over the hard drive (like your Internet Explorer cache) without a feature like that?
Maybe they're just clued in to different clues than you, man.
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.
Ander
@=
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.
The home user market is really quite small by comparison to the corporate market. Think about it, how many AOL users have a clue what PGP is, much less a desire to use it.
Since this is a small market anyway, they lose little or nothing by giving it away to this market segment. But, by giving it away, they have a greater potential to increase their mind share and their installed base. They also increase compatibility in the sense that corporations can communicate with private citizens via PGP, something that can not happen if the general public doesn't have a means of decrypting the communications.
The model is similar to many others who have been highly successful with it. Think about Real Networks, Adobe, Macromedia and even the venerable web browser Netscape and IE. They give the client away and sell the server.
Now, later on after they have established themselves as the monopoly for the communications encryption market, they can start charging the small users too because at that point those users will have to have it.
In the end, very profitable indeed.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
For some reason, PGP Corp's slogan:
;)
Protecting Confidential Information,
In Transit, In Storage, Everywhere, All the Time.
just reminds me of the Depressed Persian Towtruck Man character from MadTV...
"Allll-ways... Allll zuh time..."
I've always lamented PGP's de-evolution from a robust security tool to an antiquated piece of crap. Network Associates certainly has not spent due time in maintaining and improving PGP, and to their own loss. Now that businesses are paying serious attention to network security, it's the ideal market for a company like PGP Corporation.
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.
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/