SecureWare Inc, the Atlanta-based software house whose security technology was recently adopted by the Open Software Foundation, is trying to put together a consortium of its own that will underwrite the third and final leg of that technology. SecureWare president Michael McChesney, who said he first broached the idea of sharing development costs with potential allies nine months ago, invited at least 12 to 15 companies to a meeting on April 19 to try to formalise some kind of joint development arrangement. Among those has invited were everybody planning a multi-level Unix product, including Apple, AT&T, British Telecom, Bull, Convex, DEC, Harris, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, NCR, Nixdorf, Pyramid, Sequent, Siemens, Sun, Tektronix and Unisys. SecureWare has dubbed the undertaking Project Max, short for Multilevel Architecture for X Networks, which will be the basis of the network portion of its security system, a follow-on to the kernel portion and Compartmented Mode Workstation or X Window and Motif implementation McChesney said is complete. McChesney, who once worked for a venture capital firm, said he is looking for $1.2m a year for two years and a minimum of four participants, whose involvement would guarantee them royalty-free rights to what is developed. What SecureWare will bring to the party is a 200-page specification already written, covering the low-level but crucial TCP/IP segment SecureWare is calling MaxNet. The spec describes how 200 machines might be hooked together in a trusted network. Project Max would fund the implementation of MaxNet and some of its logical ramifications, McChesney said, but added that the breadth of those ramifications was unclear at this point, and might require additional funding. McChesney believes he can depend on at least four unidentified companies for support, but if he gets no takers SecureWare, a small company whose own research and development resources may already be stretched, will shrug and proceed on its own to develop only MaxNet at an estimated cost of some $600,000.
