Phil Jones reports.
Security is undoubtedly the next big thing on the Internet.
This is hardly the stuff of business revolution, and it will not improve until the security issues are fixed. Agreed, in recent years, some progress has been made in making the Net a safer place to do business, and the companies that have done most to further this progress have prospered. SSL goes some way to masking the data carried over the intrinsically public domain of the Internet, and does at least ensure, through its support of public-key certification, that any two parties to a transaction are who they say they are. How much bigger VeriSign becomes will probably have as much to do with how long it has to wait before becoming the next acquisition target for a Microsoft, a Netscape or an IBM, as it will with how well it can continue to develop products. VeriSign has undoubtedly benefited by being one of the first companies to bring a comprehensive PKI offering to the US, where its 128-bit encryption key software has found a ready market.