VERISIGN
On the Record: Stratton Sclavos
Sunday, January 9, 2005



In 1995, Stratton Sclavos and RSA founder Jim Bidzos created VeriSign as a spin-off that issued digital certificates, acting as an Internet notary public. Today, VeriSign secures online transactions and is branching out into handheld entertainment, radio frequency ID tags and other up-and- coming technologies. As VeriSign's chief executive officer, Sclavos has an unparalleled view of the Internet, its strengths and weaknesses. We talked with Sclavos about the rising sophistication of online crime, his company's squabbles with the Internet oversight authority and the challenges of being a parent in the digital age..

Q: VeriSign is in a lot of businesses now. Is there is a vision that ties all these things together?

A: What we have really been about over the last five years is assembling a set of assets that all plug together to make what we call intelligent infrastructure.

If you look at the Internet, we're through the first 10 years of this massive growth, (with) more people getting on and more messages being sent. We think we're at an inflection point where there's too much complexity and too much usage to do things just by adding more pipes. So the intelligent infrastructure we do sits above the pipes and below the applications and the services and makes things more efficient.

We route .com and .net addresses 14 billion times a day. We secure 400, 000 Web sites so people can communicate with their customers. We process credit cards for those same Web sites so they can take the money and put it in a bank account.

Five years from now, whether it's radio frequency ID tags on Gillette razors or Web addresses for .com and .net or phone numbers that have become voice-over IP as opposed to traditional telecom switches, we'll have those big directories running inside VeriSign data centers that make all that stuff connect and interoperate.

Q: Why should such important infrastructure be handled by the private sector?

A: We are a regulated business in .com and .net service. We have over the last five years invested $200 million in research and development and capital equipment to completely rebuild that network. You need to fuel innovation to keep this infrastructure growing, and I don't think the government would be well suited to that.

We were here before the Internet explosion. We're here after the burst of the bubble. And in those nine years, the machines have never been down, and we've taken the systems from being able to handle about 20 billion interactions a day to now, (when) our top capacity is north of 200 billion a day.

There are people at VeriSign who will work 24 hours a day if even one bit of the database that we manage gets corrupted. And we will do anything in our power to fix it within seconds if we can and minutes if we can't.

We have shared our technology and our software-monitoring tools with the Department of Homeland Security since almost its first days. They can see the network the same way we do. We just agreed to the same kind of provisions with the European Union to give their new security-monitoring center these kinds of tools. We're probably five to six years ahead of where these governments would be in thinking about how to monitor the network. And we're trying to bring them all up to that same level of visibility.

Q: What is your role in the Department of Homeland Security and are you involved with the war on terrorism?

A: We are an avid participant in their information-sharing private-public partnership. We provide them tools that we have designed so that they can see the network and its trouble the same way we can, and then we're involved in certain forensic activities on an as-needed basis.

You can read the entire interviewed http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...G22AFFKP47.DTL