Trusted Information Systems (TIS) was a computer security research and development company during the 1980s and 1990s, performing computer and communications (information) security research for organizations such as
NSA
The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collectio ...
,
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Adv ...
,
ARL
ARL may refer to:
Military
* US Navy hull classification symbol for repair ship
* Admiralty Research Laboratory, UK
* United States Army Research Laboratory
* ARL 44, a WWII French tank
Organizations
* Aero Research Limited, a UK adhesives compan ...
,
AFRL
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is a scientific research organization operated by the United States Air Force Materiel Command dedicated to leading the discovery, development, and integration of aerospace warfighting technologies, pl ...
,
SPAWAR
The Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWARSYSCOM), based in San Diego, is one of six SYSCOM Echelon II organizations within the United States Navy and is the Navy's technical authority and acquisition command for C4ISTAR, C4ISR (Command ...
, and others.
History
TIS was founded in 1983 by
NSA
The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collectio ...
veteran Steve Walker, and at various times employed notable
information security
Information security, sometimes shortened to InfoSec, is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks. It is part of information risk management. It typically involves preventing or reducing the probability of unauthorize ...
experts including
David Elliott Bell
David Elliott Bell (born in 1945) is an American mathematician and computer security pioneer. While working at Mitre Corporation, MITRE Corporation, he and Leonard J. LaPadula co-developed the highly influential Bell–LaPadula model. In 2012, Bel ...
, Martha Branstad
John PescatoreMarv Schaefer Steve Crocker
Stephen D. Crocker (born October 15, 1944) is the inventor of the Request for Comments series, authoring the first RFC and many more. He attended Van Nuys High School, as did Vint Cerf and Jon Postel. Crocker received his bachelor's degree (196 ...
,
Marcus Ranum Marcus, Markus, Márkus or Mărcuș may refer to:
* Marcus (name), a masculine given name
* Marcus (praenomen), a Roman personal name
Places
* Marcus, a Asteroid belt, main belt asteroid, also known as List of minor planets: 369001–370000#088, ( ...
, Wei Xu, John Williams
Steve Lipnerand
Carl Ellison. TIS was headquartered in Glenwood, Maryland, in a rural location. The company was started in Walker's basement on Shady Lane in Glenwood, MD. As the company grew, rather than move to
Baltimore
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
or the
Washington D.C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...
suburbs, a small office building was constructed on land next to Walker's new home on Route 97.
Products
TIS projects included as the following:
#
Trusted Xenix, the first commercially available
B2 operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
;
#
Trusted Mach
Trust is the willingness of one party (the trustor) to become vulnerable to another party (the trustee) on the presumption that the trustee will act in ways that benefit the trustor. In addition, the trustor does not have control over the acti ...
, a research project that influenced DTOS and eventually
SELinux
Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a Linux kernel security module that provides a mechanism for supporting access control security policies, including mandatory access controls (MAC).
SELinux is a set of kernel modifications and user-space t ...
;
# Domain and Type Enforcement (DTE) which likewise influenced SELinux;
#
FWTK Firewall Toolkit (the first open source firewall software) in 1993;
# First whitehouse.gov e-mail server was hosted at TIS headquarters from June 1 of 1993 to January 20 of 1995;
#
Gauntlet Firewall
Gauntlet or the gauntlet may refer to:
Common uses
*Gauntlet (glove), protective gloves used as a form of armor
*Running the gauntlet, a form of physical punishment
Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional characters
*Gauntlet (comics), a Marvel ...
in 1994, one of the first commercial firewall products, with broad range of Internet Standards, including
S/MIME S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is a standard for public key encryption and signing of MIME data. S/MIME is on an IETF standards track and defined in a number of documents, most importantly . It was originally developed by R ...
,
SNMP
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behaviour. Devices that typically ...
,
DNS
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...
,
DNSSEC
The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) are a suite of extension specifications by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for securing data exchanged in the Domain Name System (DNS) in Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The protocol ...
, and many others. This Firewall became the inception of the third generation firewall;
# IP Security (
IPSec
In computing, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in ...
) product in late 1994, known as the first IPSec VPN commercial product in IT history;
# Encryption Recovery technology integrated with
IPSEC
In computing, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in ...
,
ISAKMP Internet Security Association and Key Management Protocol (ISAKMP) is a protocol defined by RFC 2408 for establishing Security association (SA) and cryptographic keys in an Internet environment. ISAKMP only provides a framework for authentication an ...
,
IKE
Ike or IKE may refer to:
People
* Ike (given name), a list of people with the name or nickname
* Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II and President of the United States Surname
...
, and
RSA.
TIS's operating system work directly affected
BSD/OS
BSD/OS (originally called BSD/386 and sometimes known as BSDi) is a discontinued proprietary version of the BSD operating system developed by Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi).
BSD/OS had a reputation for reliability in server roles; the reno ...
, which the
Gauntlet Firewall
Gauntlet or the gauntlet may refer to:
Common uses
*Gauntlet (glove), protective gloves used as a form of armor
*Running the gauntlet, a form of physical punishment
Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional characters
*Gauntlet (comics), a Marvel ...
and
IPSec
In computing, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in ...
was based on, as well as
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
,
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...
,
HP UX
HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on Unix System V (initially System III) and first released in 1984. Current versions support HPE Integrity Ser ...
,
Sun OS
SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server (computing), server computer systems. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on Berkeley ...
,
Darwin, and others.
Post company
The company went public in 1996
and soon afterwards attempted to acquire
PGP Inc.; it was instead acquired in 1998 by
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), which later became
McAfee
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 ...
, who had already bought PGP Inc. in 1997. The security research organization became NAI Labs and the Gauntlet engineering and development organization was folded into Network Associates' engineering and development.
NAI Labs went through a couple of branding changes which complemented Network Associates' branding efforts. In 2001 the name was changed to Network Associates Laboratories to better match the corporate identity. Then, in 2002-2003, there was a major branding initiative by Network Associates culminating in selection of the flag brand, McAfee. As a result, the security research organization became McAfee Research.
In 2003, SPARTA, Inc., an employee-owned company, acquired the Network Security branch of McAfee Research.
In 2005, SPARTA acquired the remaining branches of McAfee Research, which were organized into the Security Research Division (SRD) of the Information Systems Security Operation (ISSO).
In 2008, Cobham, plc, a British aerospace company, acquired SPARTA. There have been no organizational changes to SRD or ISSO that affect the security research.
On a separate path, TIS's primary commercial product, the Gauntlet Firewall, was acquired in 1999 from McAfee by
Secure Computing Corporation
Secure Computing Corporation (SCC) was a public company that developed and sold computer security appliances and hosted services to protect users and data. McAfee acquired the company in 2008.
The company also developed filtering systems used ...
(SCC), that used to be one of TIS's major competitors, because at the time McAfee wasn't interested in being a firewall vendor.
The code base was integrated with Secure Computing's firewall product and branded Sidewinder Firewall, which then returned to McAfee when Secure Computing was acquired by them in 2008, and re-branded McAfee Enterprise Firewall. The end of this product line came in 2013, following McAfee's acquisition of another major firewall vendor, Finland-based
Stonesoft
Stonesoft Corporation was a public company that developed and sold network security solutions based in Helsinki, Finland. It was publicly owned until 2013 when it was acquired by Intel's subsidiary McAfee.
Stonesoft does business globally, with ...
. McAfee announced in October 2013 the intention to migrate their existing installed base of firewalls to Stonesoft's own Stonegate.
References
External links
LinkedIn Alumni GroupFirewall Toolkit Archive
{{Authority control
Computer security software companies
Defunct software companies of the United States
Software companies based in Maryland
McAfee
Defunct companies based in Maryland
Software companies established in 1983
Technology companies disestablished in 1998
1983 establishments in Maryland
1998 disestablishments in Maryland