PGP Corporation was a company that sold

Pretty Good Privacy Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partition ...

computer software. It was founded in 2002, and acquired by Symantec in 2010, and by

Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

in 2019.

History

PGP Corporation was co-founded in June 2002 by

Jon Callas Jon Callas is an American computer security expert, software engineer, user experience designer, and technologist who is the co-founder and former CTO of the global encrypted communications service Silent Circle.http://www.linkedin.com/in/joncal ...

and Phil Dunkelberger (who became CEO), based in

Menlo Park, California Menlo Park is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County within the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; ...

. It was funded by Rob Theis, general partner, Doll Capital Management and Terry Garnett, general partner, Venrock Associates. The company owned the

(PGP) software, which was originally developed by

Phil Zimmermann Philip R. Zimmermann (born 1954) is an American computer scientist and Cryptography, cryptographer. He is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the most widely used email encryption software in the world. He is also known for his work in VoI ...

(who had earlier started a company of a similar name). Originally written in 1991, PGP was one of the first freely and publicly available implementations of

public-key cryptography Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic alg ...

. It was originally used to allow individuals to communicate securely through

bulletin board system A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...

s. PGP later became standardized and supported by many other applications, including email. PGP Corporation acquired the code and rights to the name from

Network Associates McAfee Corp. ( ), formerly known as McAfee Associates, Inc. from 1987 to 1997 and 2004 to 2014, Network Associates Inc. from 1997 to 2004, and Intel Security Group from 2014 to 2017, is an American global computer security software company head ...

(NAI) in August 2002. The company released version 9 of the software in 2005. PGP Corporation's focus shifted towards the corporate market. In 2004, the company announced plans to integrate with Symantec anti-virus technology. In 2009, Callas left to be a security consultant. In February 2010, the company acquired certificate authority TC TrustCenter and its parent company, ChosenSecurity, to form its PGP TrustCenter division. On April 29, 2010, Symantec Corp. announced the acquisition of PGP Corporation for about $300 million cash. The merger was completed in June of that year. On August 9, 2019,

Broadcom Inc. Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

announced they would be acquiring the Enterprise Security software division of Symantec, which includes PGP Corporation.

References

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External links

PGP Corporation web site
Companies based in Menlo Park, California Cryptography companies Gen Digital acquisitions Software companies established in 2002 2010 mergers and acquisitions Software companies of the United States 2002 establishments in the United States 2002 establishments in California Companies established in 2002