If the deal was to happen, it would be the second security related business unit that VeriSign has shed in the past few months. Last October the company to AT&T in a deal, the terms of which were not disclosed.

The deal gave AT&T control of a VeriSign business unit focused on security and ID management related consulting services for Fortune 500 companies.

At that time, VeriSign CEO Mark Mclaughlin was quoted as saying that the sale was in keeping with VeriSign's goals to divest itself of certain business units.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld . Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @jaivijayan or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed . His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com .

in Computerworld's Data Security Knowledge Center.