Fortify

A plug-in for Netscape Navigator that provides 128 bit SSL encryption, this was only needed for browsers developed inside the USA but downloaded outside of said country, but local laws in the US deem encryption products to be weapons that can only be shipped with an appropriate licence. At the time licences for export even to friendly countries were limited to encryption with bit depths of on 64 bits and as these are easily breakable is meant the USA developed browsers were not suitable for things like on-line banking or shopping.

Fortify was simply developed and distributed outside of the USA, much like PGP was, so it was unencumbered by the laws of that country and offered a simple plugin that jacks up the SSL encryption to 128 bit which was the most popular bit depth at the time. The fairly slow servers and the expense of custom encryption hardware meant that higher bit depths than 128 were seldom offered by shopping sites in the 1990's.

Version

 * Last known version: Fortify v1.4.5 (1999)
 * Works on all versions of Netscape Navigator and communicator for OS/2, only needed for non-US versions of the browser.