RSA heralded the alliances as a necessary component of building data security worldwide.

RSA's major announcement at the show involved Keon, a family of products for the creation of a "public-key infrastructure" (PKI). Keon includes the underlying software and databases needed to create and manage encryption keys on a large scale.

Businesses have struggled to implement PKIs for years, confounded partly by a lack of standards — something RSA hopes it has addressed through Keon and via a deal with VeriSign Inc. Keon also makes public-key cryptography more mobile: Normally, a user's private encryption key is stored on a desktop computer, forcing the user to access the network from that particular machine. Keon will let users roam to other terminals and still use their own encryption keys to create secure networking sessions.

RSA's other announcments included alliances with Compaq Computer Corp. and digital-certificate vendor VeriSign Inc. The Intel and Compaq announcments in particular show how encryption has grown in importance for mainstream computing, said Scott Schnell, vice president of marketing for RSA (San Mateo, Calif.). In addition, the recent surge of interest in electronic commerce has ignited the demand for encryption that RSA and its competitors always had trouble rousing.

"In many ways, we [in the cryptography business] are like the year 1991 and multimedia — everybody's excited about it; nobody knows what to do with it," Schnell said.

The Intel deal opens the possibility of cryptography functions being embedded into microprocessors. Among the advantages of hardware-based cryptography would be faster calculations and the generation of truly random numbers based on thermal dissipation. The latter would be a significant improvement over computer-generated numbers, which are prone to cycles and other weaknesses.