The company also sells Web access management and federated identity technology, as well as BSAFE, an encryption technology for business applications.

More recently, RSA has moved into the consumer authentication market aggressively, buying anti-fraud technology company Cyota for $145 million in December and lightweight authentication vendor PassMark for $44 million in April.

EMC has been growing its stable of security products in recent months as it tries to meet the growing demand for security for stored data, and fend off competition with Symantec, which bought storage software vendor Veritas.

In May, EMC announced it was buying Kashya, a data replication company, for $153 million. In the last year, the company also snatched up rights management firm Authentica .

After struggling off and on in recent years, RSA has picked up steam with the shift to consumer authentication. In April, the company reported first quarter income of $5.3 million on revenue of $87.5 million, an increase of 16 percent in revenue from the same quarter in 2005.