Encryption specialist Pretty Good Privacy Inc. has completed its migration from the freeware underground to the commercial software industry. Today the company is announcing its first suite of products targeted at the business market, designed to manage and secure corporate email communications over the Internet.
"We focused on having a comprehensive solution that protects data at every stage and puts the power in hands of corporations to define their own policies," said Helena Winkler, director of product management at PGP.
The PGP Business Security Suite includes software built to manage the public key encryption tools that have previously been available as shareware and, more recently, personal software programs. The suite is built around two servers - the PGP Certificate Server and the PGP Policy Management Agent for SMTP - and end-user software, dubbed PGP for Business Security. The combination of products will allow companies to issue and manage the public and private keys used in encrypting and decrypting messages that travel across open networks like the Internet.
"It's a level of functionality that no one else has come close to," explained Andrea Liles, a Portland, Oregon-based security consultant and systems integrator for international corporations. "PGP releases source code for peer review, so you know it's really secure ... with other products, you don't really know."
With the combination of a certificate and policy server, companies could create thousands of keys and define usage policies that dictate how employees are able to use them. A company could require that all outgoing messages to certain branch offices be encrypted to a specified level, and when a user fails to do so, the message is returned with a note indicating the omitted step. In addition, companies can establish a key recovery system allowing any message sent by an employee to be decrypted with a special company key.
The programs also are designed to simplify the function of keys and digital certificates, both of which have been burdensome to use up until recently. For example, when a user wants to send and encrypt a message, the server will automatically look up the recipient's address and attach the corresponding public key to the message. By doing this, the message is encrypted in such a way that the recipient's private key is the only one that can decrypt the message.
Client software is available for Mac and Windows 95 and NT machines. The server software runs on Solaris platforms, and later this year, Windows NT.
