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In Virus Lull, Symantec Gets Viral

Posted on: Thursday, 11 May 2006, 21:05 CDT

Symantec Corp has revealed its vision for what it calls "Security 2.0", and said it has plans to launch a centralized identity repository linked to a reputation service, in order to give people and businesses a level of trust when transacting online.

Some of the services demonstrated here in San Francisco at the company's Vision user conference suggested the company will try viral marketing and a more pervasive approach to security in order to stave off slowing growth.

Enrique Salem, senior vice president of Symantec's consumer business, said in a keynote speech that Norton Accounts, which was launched with Norton Internet Security 2006, would provide the starting point for an identity/reputation service.

Hosted by Symantec but eventually accessible by third parties, the service would allow businesses and consumers to check whether some person or entity they are transacting with is signed up, and whether they have a good reputation.

It sounds a little like Microsoft's old Passport idea, which promised single sign-on across multiple web properties but which never really took off. Symantec has about 50 million Norton Accounts right now, Salem said.

Salem demonstrated a mock-up of a piece of client software he said could leverage these "Security 2.0" services. It appeared to combine a web browser and a personalized portal, but permeated with security features.

"We're not trying to be a browser, we're not trying to be a portal," he said at a press conference later. "We want to make the user experience as easy as possible, giving them one place where they can access all Security 2.0 functions in one place."

Within the software, which in the demo was named myInternet, users would be able to get single-click access to their accounts with organizations such as banks, with the software taking them straight to their logged-in account summary page.

Salem said the software would use SAML, the authentication credential exchange standard developed within OASIS, to provide this kind of access, if the banks in question support the spec.

He also demonstrated the way that the software could give a user an indication of whether particular web sites are trustworthy or not, via icons embedded in a search engine's results page.

In another part of the demo, individual users of an auction service were flagged according to whether they were members of the identity/reputation networks. It looked similar to the way eBay users can rank each other according to trust.

"At some point to get higher level of security you've got to participate in something," Salem told us later.

This is where there could be some good viral marketing opportunities for Symantec. Unlike eBay, which is a single site, "Security 2.0" would be cross-domain, so not all users of all services would initially signed up Symantec customers.

Attempting to becoming pervasive like this is a neat trick, coming as it does at a time when sales of Symantec's consumer security products, while still growing, are not the double-digit growth driver they once were, mainly because fewer high-profile viruses means fewer people are thinking about security.

Source: Datamonitor

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