In 1984, a research group called the
Secure Computing Technology Center (
SCTC) was formed at
Honeywell in
Minneapolis, Minnesota. The centerpiece of SCTC was its work on
security-evaluated operating systems for the NSA. This work included the
Secure Ada Target (SAT) and the
Logical Coprocessing Kernel (LOCK), both designed to meet the stringent A1 level of the
Trusted Computer Systems Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC). Over the next several years, Secure Computing morphed from a small
defense contractor into a commercial product vendor, largely because the investment community was much less interested in purchasing security goods from defense contractors than from commercial product vendors, especially vendors in the growing
Internet space. Secure Computing became a publicly traded company in 1995. Following the pattern of other
Internet-related startups, the stock price tripled its first day: it opened at $16 a share and closed at $48. The price peaked around $64 in the next several weeks and then collapsed over the following year or so. It ranged between roughly $3 and $20 afterward until the company was purchased by McAfee. The company headquarters were moved to
San Jose, California, in 1998, though the bulk of the workforce remained in the
Twin Cities. The Roseville employees completed a move to
St. Paul, Minnesota, in February 2006. Several other sites now exist, largely the result of mergers.
Mergers and acquisitions Secure Computing consisted of several merged units, one of the oldest being Enigma Logic, Inc., which was started around 1982. Bob Bosen, the founder, claims to have created the first
security token to provide
challenge–response authentication. Bosen published a
computer game for the
TRS-80 home computer in 1979, called
80 Space Raiders, that used a simple challenge–response mechanism for copy protection. People who used the mechanism encouraged him to repackage it for remote authentication. Bosen started Enigma Logic to do so, and filed for patents in 1982–83; a patent was issued in the United Kingdom in 1986. Ultimately, the "challenge" portion of the challenge–response was eliminated to produce a
one-time password token similar to the
SecurID product. Enigma Logic merged with Secure Computing Corporation in 1996. Secure Computing acquired the SmartFilter product line by purchasing Webster Network Strategies, the producer of the WebTrack product, in 1996. The acquisition included the domain name webster.com, which was eventually sold to the publishers of ''
Webster's Dictionary''. Shortly after acquiring the Webster/SmartFilter product, Secure Computing merged with Border Network Technologies, a Canadian company selling the
Borderware firewall. Border Network Technologies boasted an excellent product and a highly developed set of sales channels; some said that the sales channels were a major inducement for the merger. Although the plan was to completely merge the Borderware product with Sidewinder, and to offer a single product to existing users of both products, this never quite succeeded. In 1998, the Borderware business unit was sold to a new company, Borderware Technologies Inc., formed by one of the original Borderware founders. By this time, the mergers had yielded a highly distributed company with offices in
Minnesota,
Florida,
California, and two or three in
Ontario. This proved unwieldy, and the company scaled back to offices in Minnesota and California. In 2002, the company took over the Gauntlet Firewall product from
Network Associates. In 2003, Secure Computing acquired
N2H2, the makers of the
Bess web filtering package. There has been some consolidation of Bess and SmartFilter, and Bess is now referred to as "Smartfilter, Bess edition" in company literature. An acquisition of
CyberGuard was announced in August 2005 and approved in January 2006. (A year earlier, CyberGuard had attempted to acquire Secure Computing, but the proposal had been rejected). This was the largest merger by Secure Computing at the time and resulted in the addition of several product lines, including three classes of firewalls, content and protocol filtering systems, and an enterprise-wide management system for controlling all of those products. Several offices were also added, including CyberGuard's main facility in
Deerfield Beach, Florida, as well as the Webwasher development office in
Paderborn, Germany, and a SnapGear development office in
Brisbane, Australia. In 2006, the company merged with Atlanta-based
CipherTrust, a developer of email security solutions. The merger was announced in July 2006 and completed in August 2006. On July 30, 2008, Secure Computing announced its intention to sell the SafeWord authentication product line to
Aladdin Knowledge Systems, leaving the company with a business focused on web/mail security and firewalls. The sale was concluded later that year. On September 22, 2008, McAfee announced its intention to acquire Secure Computing. The acquisition was completed not long afterwards, and the combined company formed the world's largest dedicated security company at the time. ==Products==