In parallel with its efforts to double down on high-growth areas such as endpoint security, Symantec Corp. has been working to scale back traditional businesses with more limited prospects. A new Reuters report indicates that the company’s web certificate group may be the next division to end up on the auction block.

Three sources have told the news agency that Symantec is negotiating a potential sale with a “small number of companies and private equity firms.” A deal can be reasonably expected to fetch over $1 billion, seeing that the company paid $1.28 billion to buy it from Verisign Inc. back in 2010. Symantec is no stranger to high-value disinvestment initiatives: It sold the Veritas data protection group to private equity firm Carlyle Group LP last year in a $8 billion transaction.

But the sources who leaked word of the negotiations over the certification business stressed that it’s not certain Symantec will reach a deal. Moreover, the company may struggle to get an attractive price if the talks advance since the division is at the center of a potentially costly dispute with Google Inc.

The search giant recently announced plans to gradually stop its Chrome browser from accepting Symantec certifications after finding that 30,000 have been wrongly issued over the past few years. Website operators that don’t migrate in the allocated time frame stand to lose a significant amount of traffic, which could leave Symantec with a customer exodus on its hands. 

The company is currently reviewing a proposal by Google to overhaul its certificate management infrastructure as part of a joint effort meant to reach an understanding. But while the fact that the companies have decided to collaborate should be positive news to prospective bidders, Symantec is a long way off from solving the problem. Meanwhile, the search giant’s certificate deprecation plan is moving ahead unchanged while the affected website operators continue to face uncertainty.

Even if Symantec were to accept the overhaul proposal tomorrow, implementing the changes could take months. As a result, any potential buyer would either have to wait until the initiative is completed or assume at least some of the responsibility for carrying out the required upgrades. Given these considerations, the web certificate business may prove to be a tough sell.

Image: Symantec