Acquisition brings accelerator cards in house

nCipher has acquired the trade and certain assets of Britestream Networks, predominantly comprising stock, fixed assets and intellectual property.

nCipher has acquired the trade and certain assets of Britestream Networks, predominantly comprising stock, fixed assets and intellectual property.

The acquisition enables nCipher to take full ownership of its line of cryptographic accelerator solutions, nFast and nForce.

The products, originally developed jointly by Britestream and nCipher and introduced by nCipher in August 2005, will be manufactured by nCipher following this acquisition.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

"I am very pleased that nCipher has been able to bring these products fully into our portfolio, enabling us to offer our customers one of the fastest and most secure ranges of SSL acceleration products in the world", said Alex van Someren, Chief Executive Officer of nCipher.

"In addition, our product margins will also be enhanced by this acquisition, further reinforcing nCipher's robust financial position".

nCipher's SSL accelerators and offload cards can be used to enable the use of SSL with any networked application, eliminating the speed penalty and security risks associated with processing SSL-protected traffic in software.

Traditional SSL accelerators do only one thing: performing the computation-intensive cryptographic calculations necessary to initiate each SSL session.

nForce and nFast take the acceleration process several steps further by offloading all of the tasks necessary to handle SSL on a dedicated plug-in server expansion card, removing potential performance bottlenecks and therefore maximising the capacity of the overall system.

Both products deliver "plug-and-play" functionality for processing network traffic obeying the industry-standard Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) network protocols at performance levels of up to 10,000 connections per second.

In addition, nForce also offers logical and physical protection of cryptographic keys using nCipher's Security World key management technology validated to the FIPS140-2 security standard.

nFast and nForce provide all the functionality necessary to establish very high volumes of SSL/TLS connections over an IP network, for example in secure web servers.

Both cards come equipped with an Ethernet interface and effectively replace the existing network interface card (NIC) of the host server.

SSL encrypted traffic arriving over the network is decrypted in hardware and passed to the host, and traffic passing back to the network is encrypted whenever SSL protection is required.

Non-SSL traffic passes through the card transparently.

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