RSA kicks off the Share Project this week at RSA Conference 2009, by offering application developers a no-cost download of the RSA BSAFE Share encryption toolkit, encouraging built-in versus bolted-on security, using tools based on RSA BSAFE products, the world's most trusted and widely-deployed encryption software.
RSA BSAFE encryption products have a rich heritage in providing essential data privacy, integrity and transactional security in thousands of IT products, with over a billion applications in widespread use today, including the most widely used Internet browser. Where constrained IT budgets and small-scale or non-commercial projects have not, in the past, made it practical to use RSA BSAFE code, the no-cost RSA BSAFE Share software developer kit (SDK) offers another trustworthy and interoperable alternative. This allows project leaders and corporate and independent developers to add and integrate world-class encryption into their own commercial and non-commercial applications and products.
"The global community of technology developers and users find their applications and the information they manage under constant attack by an increasingly sophisticated fraudster underground. We must collaborate as a community to develop a stronger and healthier ecosystem than the fraudsters to stay at least one step ahead," said Chris Young, Senior Vice President of Products at RSA. "The distribution of RSA BSAFE Share products offers essential cryptographic tools -- that are wholly interoperable with the existing RSA BSAFE installed base -- for corporate and independent developers who are considering application development projects for which the use of licensed commercial code is, today, economically not practical."
The RSA Share Project is designed to arm developers and their managers with the tools and support necessary to protect their products and applications. The software found within the RSA Share Project -- based on RSA's industry-leading products, and the tools and utilities RSA uses internally to manage and audit secure application development -- will provide a foundational platform to build secure applications. The goal of the RSA Share Project is not merely for the distribution of free technologies, but to promote and build a vibrant community of security-focused engineers, developers and users committed to software security assurance.
"Application end users are becoming increasingly aware of the threats posed by fraudsters, but in the end they want security to be built into products at the time they are developed -- not considered as an afterthought," said Eric Baize, Senior Director of the Product Security Office at EMC Corporation. "We have an opportunity to reinvent the way security is applied to enable the safe and frictionless flow of information, but capitalizing on this opportunity demands we collaborate in new and far more constructive ways. This is the goal of the RSA Share Project, inviting developers to participate in an online community with some of the greatest minds in cryptography and software security."
The RSA BSAFE Share software is available for free download on the RSA Share Project community website, offered as SDKs supporting C/C++ and Java. These products are fully interoperable with the thousands of applications already embedded with RSA BSAFE encryption. In the future, the RSA Share Project will provide more functionality above and beyond encryption, allowing members to solve a variety of security problems with no-cost SDKs designed to help ease and manage secure application development.