Computer Security

SAN FRANCISCO -- Aviation officials have quietly notified airports in the United States and Britain that a design flaw in a widely used security system could enable terrorists to gain control of the electronic badges that allow employees with security clearance to enter and leave restricted areas.The computer security experts who discovered the flaw say that the same system, which is made by a small company in Southern California, is frequently used in state prisons, county jails, financial institutions, technology companies, drug companies, county and federal government buildings -- including the CIA -- and by military contractors.

Trusted Information Systems Inc. said yesterday that the U.S. government has agreed to let it export the strongest computer encryption systems that have ever been allowed to leave the United States.The Commerce Department gave permission for the Glenwood-based computer security company to export encryption systems that have mathematical keys of up to 168 "bits" long, a measure of the strength of the coding and the difficulty it will pose to hackers or government officials trying to crack the code.

When Rockville-based Axent Technologies went public in April, investors drove up it's stock price 34 percent, to $18.75 from $14, in the first day's trading. That roar of support made Axent one of the hottest traded stocks in the U.S. that day.So far, Wall Street's swooning hasn't waned for Maryland's newest publicly held company, which raised $36 million in the IPO. Axent's stock has risen as high as $21.75 since the April 24 public offering.What's all the fuss about?After all, Axent is a young company that posted a loss last year.

THE GOOD TIMES virus is a hoax.For more than a year, people have been sending alarms to one another via electronic mail that an insidious computer virus called Good Times is spreading over the Internet.According to the warnings, anyone who opens an electronic mail message with the words "Good Times" in its subject line risks all sorts of horrors, ranging from the erasure of hard disc drives to exploding video monitors.The E-mail warnings sound sufficiently dweeby to impress even experienced computer users.

Call it the Son of Netscape.A huge boom following Friday's initial public offering by a Minneapolis computer security firm has resulted in an $80 million paper gain for Grotech Capital Group, as the Timonium venture capital firm surfed the wave of Internet investing and rode Secured Computing Inc. shares from a $16 offering to yesterday's closing price of $55.50.For Grotech, which funded the company when it was spun off by Honeywell Inc. in 1989 and paid a total of $4 million for its 2 million shares, it was a big score even by the standards of the boom-and-bust venture capital business.

Trusted Information Systems, one of western Howard County's three largest employers and an international leader in computer security, is expanding again.The company, which started in the Glenwood home of founder and President Stephen T. Walker, has outgrown its office building on Route 97 and is constructing an identical building.Mr. Walker, a former computer security expert with the National Security Agency and the Pentagon, started his company with a single worker in 1983.In little more than a decade, he had more than 100 employees and offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco and London.

Despite recent alarms about a lack of security on the Internet, computer security experts meeting in Baltimore this week agreed that safe commerce over the worldwide network will be able to go forward in short order with no fundamental changes in its structure.Participants interviewed at the National Information Systems Security Conference yesterday said that strong programs for scrambling messages will make the Internet reasonably -- though not perfectly -- safe for financial transactions despite the fact the system was not built with security in mind.

Information Resource Engineering Inc., a White Marsh-based computer security company that has bounced in and out of profitability in recent years, reported yesterday that it dipped back into the red during its second quarter despite doubling its revenues over the same quarter of 1994.IRE reported a net loss of $391,568, or 11 cents a share, compared with a loss of $152,500, or 5 cents a share, in last year's second quarter. Revenues jumped to $1.1 million from $518,074 a year earlier, but that growth fell far short of the quadrupling of revenue IRE enjoyed during the first quarter.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Companies are taking more safety measures to protect the security of information on their computer networks, according to a recent study by the Computer Security Institute.The study, the institute's first, said 60 percent of 242 companies and government agencies surveyed use encryption technology to protect their data.Computer network security has become more important as more companies connect far-flung operations using local and wide area networks. When a company uses a network or has users dial into a network using public telephone lines, the risk of security breaches rises.

UAW, Chrysler reach agreementUnited Auto Workers union members who went on strike yesterday reached a tentative agreement with Chrysler Corp. and planned to head back to work, a union official said."