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Technology Stocks : RSA Security Inc. (RSAS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Norm Demers who wrote (290)	9/11/2000 11:04:11 AM
From: Norm Demers	Respond to of 374

Good News: "Bad news for RSA? Not really. "That was a very small portion of our business," said RSA spokesman Steve Casey. While the RSA algorithm is embedded in many of its products, direct sales and licensing fees for the algorithm brought in only about $500,000 last year, compared to total revenues of $218 million. Casey said that RSA makes most of its money by selling its own customized implementations of the algorithm, and that the company is prepared to compete with all comers" 9/11/00 - The Boston Globe High-Tech Sector Report Sep. 11 (The Boston Globe/KRTBN)--ANTIVIRUS RESEARCHERS FEND OFF HOSTILE PALM PROGRAM: It was only a matter of time before viruses and Trojan horse programs began to target those popular pocket computers from Palm Inc. So the recent announcement of a hostile Palm program called Liberty came as no surprise to Carey Nachenberg, chief antivirus researcher at Symantec Corp. "We've been doing research on the Palm platform for quite awhile," said Nachenberg, whose company is one of several that have introduced software to fend off Liberty. "The problem was if you produce an antivirus software for a product that doesn't have viruses, you almost coax the virus writers into writing one." So Symantec held off until a real threat appeared. That happened in late August, when the Swedish developer of a Palm-based game called Liberty deliberately created a Trojan horse version of the product. This version would destroy all data stored on the device. The developer of the program said he never intended for his program to become publicly available, but it did, thereby becoming the first known case of a destructive program written especially for the Palm. And it gave Nachenberg the green light to develop a cure. Nachenberg admits that the Liberty program is relatively harmless. After all, most Palm users have copies of their data stored on their desktop computers. But he warned that as palmtops and cell phones become more sophisticated, they will inevitably fall prey to a cascade of new attack software. Today's cell phones, for instance, are fairly dumb devices. But there are already phones that use the Palm operating system. That would make them smart enough to run dangerous programs. Imagine 10,000 cell phones all dialing 911 at the same moment. That's the sort of think Nachenberg and his colleagues are preparing for. "It's really an arms race," he said, "between the antivirus [programmers] and the virus writers." Companies around the world use the RSA encryption algorithm to protect their data from snoops. Now the patent on the code has expired and Bedford-based RSA Security Inc. faces a horde of competitors who can sell RSA-based data security products of their own. Bad news for RSA? Not really. "That was a very small portion of our business," said RSA spokesman Steve Casey. While the RSA algorithm is embedded in many of its products, direct sales and licensing fees for the algorithm brought in only about $500,000 last year, compared to total revenues of $218 million. Casey said that RSA makes most of its money by selling its own customized implementations of the algorithm, and that the company is prepared to compete with all comers. Bruce Schneier, president of the encryption consulting firm Counterpane Internet Security Inc., agrees that the expiration of the RSA patent is no big deal. But he says it's because so many encryption users have standardized around other algorithms whose patents expired years ago. "None of the standards are RSA," said Schneier. For instance, Pretty Good Privacy, perhaps the most famous encryption program, uses the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, which expired three years ago. "To me," said Schneier, "it's a really big non-event." The heavy-duty Unix operating system and its upstart younger brother Linux have a reputation for being more secure than mass-market software like Microsoft Windows. But that doesn't mean they're perfect. Last week saw announcements of newly discovered security flaws in Unix and Linux that could serve as catnip to ambitious computer vandals. The SecurityFocus Web site (www.securityfocus.org) reports on a newly discovered exploit that uses the printing functions of Unix or Linux machines to trick them into running subversive commands. "This has been known for quite a while," said SecurityFocus chief technology officer Elias Levy. "It wasn't until the last two or three months that we saw an increase in the number of security problems that were found." Levy said major Unix software vendors like Sun Microsystems Inc. were working on patches to repair the bug. "Most of the Linux vendors have done so already," he added. Each week, Sector Report examines a different segment of the high-tech economy. By Hiawatha Bray