Mountain View, Calif. - Taher Elgamal, who developed Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and was Netscape's security guru, just scored another big hit.
This month The Kroll-O'Gara Company bought Elgamal's Securify for $60 million. Securify is a Silicon Valley consultancy that deals with security in e-commerce and The Kroll-O'Gara company, based in Ohio, specializes in site security and investigations.
Elgamal started Securify last year with $5.5 million in private funding. This latest stock-swap deal makes Elgamal, who is already a stock-option millionaire from his days at Netscape, even richer. But for the man who invented SSL, the browser/server encryption technology now used by the Internet masses, there are no plans to slow down because, well, security is "fun."
"I like doing this," says Elgamal, who saw Securify grow from 9 to 23 people since he launched the company with fellow engineer and co-founder Dan Kolkowitz last February. The firm's new owner provides professional services to combat white-collar crime. Kroll-O'Gara will maintain Securify as a separate division for information systems security while expanding its staff to around 70 by year-end.
Securify readily dispenses advice on running extranets that allow trading partners into internal corporate nets, however, it lacks the size to take on clientele on an international basis. Kroll-O'Gara expects to change this by installing a new senior management team at Securify. This new team will eventually have Securify consultants working in Kroll-O'Gara's 17 offices abroad.
Though Elgamal is reluctant to discuss his client base he notes that the merger with Kroll-O'Gara should give Securify a foot in the door with large companies now trying to solve the thorny security problems related to e- commerce with consumers or trading partners.
In pioneering SSL when he was Netscape's chief scientist, Elgamal became a legend within cryptography circles. But this Stanford University Ph.D. in public-key cryptography readily concedes encryption is but a small piece of the security puzzle. "More important is the authentication that has to occur at an e-commerce site," Elgamal says. "Customers and others are getting into your site, and you can't tell who is who, and it's a mess."
Depending on risk factors simple passwords may be an adequate means of authentication, Elgamal says. But, "generally speaking, use of digital certificate technologies for user authentication" is a more rigorous security approach.
Elgamal isn't the only Securify investor on the way to the bank. Other founding investors are Netscape CEO James Barksdale, RSA Data Security CEO Jim Bidzos and Oracle Senior Vice President Marc Benioff.
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