NAI Labs is the
research division of
NAI (
Network Associates, inc.). Formerly called
TIS Labs (
Trusted Information Systems), the name was changed as a result of purchase by NAI. NAI's main purpose for the purchase of TIS was the acquisition of the
Gauntlet firewall. That is, of course, not all of what TIS did: TIS is primarily a
network and
security research firm which is funded by government contracts from the likes of
DARPA and the
NSA to create new technologies, refine old ones, and generally improve the state of security of computer systems and networks. In fact, we do quite a bit of work on
open source systems, especially
FreeBSD and
Linux, not to mention a huge amount of the work done on
BIND.
So, generally, we are a bunch who tend to write lots of useful software, participate in standards creation, propose new ideas (and consequently implement and spearhead them), and present research in academic conferences. The main office is in Glenwood, Maryland (a while North of DC, out in the countryside), having most of the NAI Labs employees, where we have most of a two-story office building.
It's pretty ironic TIS was bought by Network Associates, who also bought PGP, at a time when TIS was actually looking into purchasing PGP. The even more ironic part of it all is despite being bought by Network Associates simply to get Gauntlet and its developers, we're actually the part of the PGP business unit that is going to be retained, despite announcements that the rest of it is being either absorbed into the McAfee, Magic, or Sniffer (or outright sold or let go...).
By the way, if you ever want to find code we release under our current corporate umbrella, look for "Networks Associates Technologies, Inc.". I have no idea what that is all supposed to mean, but supposedly it's some kind of holding company or somesuch that we never use for anything else otherwise (^_^)