EMC’s RSA security division is offering free downloads of its BSAFE Share encryption technology as part of a new initiative targeting software developers.
The program is dubbed the RSA Share Project and also includes a new online community meant to provide developers access to support, information and services, officials at RSA told eWEEK.
“Basically our view of the market right now is that securing information and securing credentials is really complicated by the fact that there are things that move everywhere, and it’s very difficult to solve that problem without having security everywhere,” said Tom Corn, vice president of products and strategy for RSA. “That doesn’t happen unless security starts getting built into physical infrastructure and we can create an ecosystem where things work together well.”
Companies constrained by small IT budgets have sometimes found the costs associated with using RSA BSAFE code difficult to overcome, he added. The availability of no-cost RSA BSAFE Share software developer kits changes that.
“In our view, solving this problem was more than just making certain of the technology available at no cost but actually helping kind of build a community around it to assist that and also to enable us to provide higher-end services to people who needed professional services in building these kinds of products,” Corn said.
The RSA BSAFE Share software is available for download on the RSA Share Project community Web site, offered as SDKs supporting C/C++ and Java. According to RSA, the products are fully interoperable with the thousands of applications already embedded with RSA BSAFE encryption.
For applications that require FIPS 140 validated cryptography, RSA will continue to license its own FIPS-compliant version of RSA BSAFE software. RSA plans to eventually provide more functionality beyond just encryption with no-cost SDKs designed to help ease and manage secure application development.
“The global software developer community embraces a variety of commercial, free and open source development tools, each that excel in specific areas and are each appropriate in specific use scenarios,” said Paul Kurtz, executive director of the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code (SAFECode), in a statement. “RSA is offering a very simple way to get proven security capabilities into the hands of those who desire a higher level of security assurance in their application development projects.”