Thawte
More info
- Creator
- Mark Shuttleworth
- Released
- 1995
- Type
- Certificate authority
- Owner
- DigiCert (from 2017)
A South African certificate authority whose sale to VeriSign paid for a trip to space and for Ubuntu.
Mark Shuttleworth started Thawte in 1995, when US export rules made strong cryptography awkward to sell abroad. A company based in South Africa could issue SSL certificates worldwide without those restrictions, and Thawte quickly became the largest issuer after VeriSign.
VeriSign solved that problem by buying its rival in 1999 for $575 million. Shuttleworth spent the money on a trip to the ISS in 2002 and on founding the company behind Ubuntu in 2004. The Thawte brand passed to Symantec in 2010 and DigiCert in 2017; its free personal email certificates had already been dropped in 2009.