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Thawte Bought by Verisign

Posted by Hemos on from the nice-chunk-of-change dept.

ChrisKnight was of the many people that wrote with the story on news.com that VeriSign has purchased Thatwe Consulting. Purchase price was reportedly $575 million, although the deal must still be approved.

2 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. time for an open-source competitor by epictetus · · Score: 5

    Verisign is sure to jack up their prices if and when the deal goes through. There should be a market for cheap certificates sold to small sites that want to be secure without paying a Verisign tax.

    There's already open-source software out there for generating certificates. The other barriers to entry are:

    1. Name recognition. If you're in charge of security at a medium to big size company, your chief goal is to protect your own ass. To that end, you'll spend the extra money to buy Verisign, because nobody ever got fired for using Verisign.

    2. Being in the browser. This is a big one; your CA cert has to be pre-loaded into your user's browsers. This involves paying many thousands of dollars to MS and Netscape.

    The other things you need to be a CA are:

    1. Legal staff and Certification Practice Statement.

    2. Clerks for researching and verifying identity.

    3. A killer operations and security infrastructure to protect the CA's key and prevent unauthorized signing.

    CAs can and should be a commodity. The thing to watch out for is Verisign introducing proprietary technology into their certificates, or making exclusive deals with the browser manufacturers.

  2. Bad news by EisPick · · Score: 5

    Consider the following:

    • As this chart on the Thawte site makes clear, these two companies combined own almost 100% of the market.
    • The barriers to entry in this market are huge: A new certificate authority would not be recognized by the current installed base of browsers.
    • Having two competing firms in this market clearly benefitted consumers. A server certificate from VeriSign costs $349; Thawte's costs $125.

    This is bad news for consumers.