US security vendor goes down under

Leading US security vendor, RSA Data Security, has entered the international market from a launch-pad in Australia.

Jim Bidzos, RSA president, said the Australian base was a response to the strong demand for privacy in electronic commerce. "We are setting up operations abroad to avoid US export regulations on strong encryption," he told Silicon.com.

Australia permits the export of 128bit encryption software to any country it deems 'responsible'.

RSA marked its international launch with its first worldwide release of full-strength Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which has become the standard for Web browser security. SSL offers secure communication between a Web browser and a server, enabling surfers to email their credit card details over the Web.

This is RSA's first strong, international SSL product, although 128bit SSL is already available in Europe, based on publicly available source code. The company also opened a Japanese base three years ago.

RSA has recruited leading SSL cryptographers, Eric Young and Tim Hudson, to help its expansion. Young and Hudson, who are both based in Brisbane, Australia, are best known for developing an open source version of RSA's SSL algorithm, which they distributed outside the US in the early days of security software.

Mike Usher, analyst at Indici Salus, told Silicon.com that he was not surprised RSA chose Australia above Europe for its international base. "There is an awful lot of work on PKI [public key infrastructure] going on in Asia-Pacific," he said. "The Australian government is way ahead of Europe on this."