Pretty Good Privacy Gets To Business

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September 04, 1998 (3:31 PM EDT)

By Rutrell Yasin,

Pretty Good Privacy is no longer just for geeks.

That's the message Network Associates (NA) wants to convey next week with the rollout of PGP Enterprise Security 3.0, a new corporate version of the e-mail and file-encryption technology that was first popularized as freeware for individual Internet users.

The new software will support X.509 digital certificates, enabling the PGP software to communicate with a wider range of enterprise-security tools that use encryption, NA officials said. It also will be closely integrated with company's server and management tools, helping administrators distribute and manage strong encryption, and control security policy across an enterprise, they said.

PGP users view the X.509 support as a step in the right direction. "It can't do anything but help make [PGP] more corporate-palatable," said Emerson Graham, a security engineer at MCI.

Developed as freeware by Phil Zimmermann seven years ago, PGP has long been viewed as a tool for Internet geeks and scientists. With its $36 million purchase of Pretty Good Privacy last year, NAI wanted to change that perception.

"Basically, PGP was geared toward the individual user. It wouldn't scale above a couple of hundred users," said Jeff Harrell, product manager for NA's Total Network Security division. The new version can scale to hundreds of thousands of users, he said.

PGP currently uses its own proprietary technology for public-key exchange, but X.509 will let PGP users talk with P Security-based firewalls and virtual private networking solutions such as NA's Gauntlet firewall, Harrell said.

With PGP Enterprise Security 3.0, users of PGP and X.509 certificates can perform client-to-client print and file sharing, he added.

PGP Enterprise Security 3.0's integration with NA's centralized management tools will let network administrators distribute and manage 128-bit encryption throughout an enterprise, Harrell said.

E-mail Enhancements
The new version also can be used with a wider range of e-mail software, including products from Novell, Microsoft, and Qualcomm. Support for e-mail clients from Lotus and Netscape will be available by the first quarter of next year, Harrell said.

With PGP Enterprise Security 3.0, companies will be able to take advantage of PGP capabilities such as key splitting, which lets encrypted data be recovered if the original key is unavailable. PGP lets users split a private key among as many as ten people, said Harrell.

PGP Enterprise Security 3.0 is composed of PGP Desktop Security 6.0 client, Policy Management Agent, Certificate Server, and a software-developers tool kit.

For a one-year subscription, PGP Enterprise Security 3.0 costs $84 per node for one to 25 users, and $26 per node for 1,000 users or more.