Symantec upgrades Web security portfolio

12 years ago

Upgrades to Symantec’s Web site Security Solution portfolio provides enhanced protection for Internet-based shopping, advertising and online applications for business and consumers, according to the company.

Symantec also said it is offering for the first time, commercially available secure socket layer (SSL) certificates using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and digital signature algorithm (DSA).

EEC will be 10,000 times harder to break than an RSA 2048-bit cryptography key based on industry computation methods, according to Symantec. The Symantec 256-bit ECC certificates offer security equivalent to a 3072-bit RSA certificate.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommend that all Web sites migrate from RSA 1024-bit to 2048-bit certificates by January 2014. Symantec said it began transitioning customers to the new standard last year, but new product offers even greater protection, said Fran Rosch, vice-president of identity and authentication services at Symantec.

Symantec has partnered with Web hosting companies and service providers such as Google, Citrix, Akamai, Juniper Networks, F5, HD Global, Opera and Red Hat to integrate ECC to their IT systems, according to Symantec.

The company said its ECC certificate provides improved server performance during peak loads with the ability to process more request per second with lower CPU usage. This becomes more important for organizations are mobile and tablet adoption increases and bump up demands on the Web infrastructure.

Symantec’s internal tests showed a server with an RSA certificate handled 450 requests per second with an average response time of 150 milliseconds to the desktop clients. Servers with ECC certificates under the same condition handled the same requests in just 75 milliseconds.

ECC can scale to handle online interactions with billions of connected endpoints, providing organizations with greater capabilities in online data sharing, cloud services and ecommerce, while improved computational performance will benefit end users, said Symantec.