Trusted Information Systems

» see tis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Steve Walker left the NSA and started Trusted Information Systems in 1983 out of his basement on Shady Lane in Glenwood, Maryland. When it outgrew that, the obvious move was Baltimore or the Washington suburbs, where the customers and the cleared staff were. He had a small office building put up on the land next to his new house on Route 97 instead, and the company stayed rural for its entire life.

The customer list was federal: the NSA, DARPA, the Army Research Laboratory, the Air Force Research Laboratory, SPAWAR. The staff list, read now, is a roll call of 1990s information security. David Elliott Bell of the Bell-LaPadula model, Steve Crocker who wrote RFC 1, Marcus Ranum, Marv Schaefer, Martha Branstad, Steve Lipner, Carl Ellison. For fifteen years an unusual share of American computer security was being done in a building in a field.

TIS went public in 1996 and then tried to buy PGP Inc. It did not get it. Network Associates had already acquired PGP in 1997, and in February 1998 it came for TIS as well, signing a merger agreement on the 22nd and announcing it the next day as a stock-for-stock pooling of interests valued at over 300 million dollars. The deal closed on 28 April 1998 through a vehicle called Thor Acquisition Corp, each TIS share converting into 0.4845 of a Network Associates share.

~ the record ~

~ the toolkit ~

In 1993 TIS released the FWTK, the Firewall Toolkit, as source code anyone could read and build. It is usually named as the first open-source firewall software, and it mattered far beyond the people who ran it in production, because it was a working example at a moment when most organizations connecting to the internet had no idea what the thing on the boundary was supposed to do. You could read how a proxy was meant to behave instead of being told.

The commercial product followed in 1994 as the Gauntlet firewall, one of the first firewalls you could buy, and it kept pace with the standards as they arrived: S/MIME, SNMP, DNS, DNSSEC. By the time Network Associates was making its case for the merger, a CSI and Zona survey had Gauntlet as the second most widely used firewall product on the market. Late in 1994 TIS also shipped what is described as the first commercial IPSec VPN product. That is the other half of the boundary problem, and the half still sitting in everyone's router today.

The operating system work is less famous and arguably went further. Trusted Xenix was the first commercially available B2 system. Trusted Mach and Domain and Type Enforcement both fed into DTOS and from there into SELinux, which is running on an enormous number of machines right now under a name nobody associates with a company in rural Maryland.

~ the mail server in the woods ~

From 1 June 1993 to 20 January 1995, the first whitehouse.gov email server was hosted at TIS headquarters. The White House's mail ran out of the office building next to Steve Walker's house for roughly nineteen months, which is both an excellent piece of trivia and a fair summary of how young the government internet was at the time.

After the merger the research arm became NAI Labs, then Network Associates Laboratories in 2001, then McAfee Research when the corporate branding settled on McAfee in 2002 and 2003. SPARTA bought the network security branch in 2003 and the rest in 2005, and Cobham bought SPARTA in 2008. Gauntlet went a different way: McAfee sold it to Secure Computing in 2002, which folded the code into its Sidewinder firewall, which came back to McAfee in 2008 when it bought Secure Computing, and the product line finally ended in 2013 after McAfee acquired Stonesoft and announced in October that year that it would migrate the installed base to Stonegate. Fifteen years of acquisitions, passing one codebase back and forth between two companies that kept selling it to each other.

The logo carried a line under the wordmark: Building a World of Trust. The year that merger closed was the year I got my first dial-up account in Turkey, and the firewall ideas I later took for granted had already been worked out in that Maryland field by people whose names I did not learn until I went looking them up for this page. Infrastructure is supposed to disappear like that, which is how a company gets to be this consequential and this completely forgotten at the same time.

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