FSA Corporation - PowerBroker

PowerBroker

The sale of Load Balancer left the company with staff and cash, but no product. Freedman had developed and marketed a 3-day UNIX security course in 1992, and had developed significant contacts within the banking, defense, and chip-making communities. These customers all had similar problems in managing large UNIX networks, specifically concerning the control and audit of the actions of the systems' administrators. The problem was that the root account used by systems administrators when reconfiguring parts of the system, was able to edit any of the audit trails created by the system. Freedman designed a new product, PowerBroker, that was similar in concept to today's sudo products, but which allowed centralized control and auditing of an entire network even down to the keystroke level, with the logs stored on a dedicated remote computer to which the system administrators typically did not have access. By vetting all access and logging through this remote machine, a secure log could be maintained. The system was ported to over 22 versions of UNIX to accommodate the newer, larger networks with hundreds or thousands of machines. Dean Huxley was responsible for most of the system-level programming on PowerBroker, with Kevin Chmilar and Earle Lowe also contributing.

The PowerBroker product line was sold non-exclusively to Raxco and Symark Software (now known as BeyondTrust).

• Raxco launched Axent Technologies, as "a division exclusively committed to providing cross-platform, client/server security solutions", and the product was renamed UNIX Privilege Manager (UPM). Axent was subsequently sold to Symantec Corporation, who later spun of UPM and other products as PassGo Technologies, now part of Quest Software.
• BeyondTrust continues to sell the product under the PowerBroker name.