| Sanctum | |
| Type: | Private Company |
| Predecessor: | Perfecto Technologies |
| Successor: | IBM |
| Founder: | Gili Raanan and Eran Reshef |
| Defunct: | 2006 |
| Fate: | Acquired |
| Industry: | Software, Information Technology |
| Products: | AppShield and AppScan |
| Foundation: | 1997 |
| Location City: | Santa Clara, California |
| Location: | Herzliya, Israel |
| Homepage: | www.IBM.com |
Sanctum was a Santa Clara, California-based information technology company focused on application security. Sanctum offered a firewall, AppShield, and scanner, AppScan, for application-layer security for Web environments.[1]
In 2003 Sanctum was merged with Watchfire and the company was subsequently acquired by IBM.[2]
Sanctum was founded in 1997 as Perfecto Technologies, by Eran Reshef and Gili Raanan.
The company released its first product AppShield in summer of 1999.[3]
The company has done an extensive research in application security and applying formal methods to real life software[4] in collaboration with Turing Award winner Professor Amir Penueli. Early research in 1996 and 1997 led to the invention, in parallel to other teams, of CAPTCHA technology, and the application for a US patent for CAPTCHA.[5]
In 2000 the company renamed itself to Sanctum.[6] The company was backed by investors Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, Goldman Sachs, DLJ, Walden and Mofet.[7]
The AppShield product was the first product to inspect incoming Hypertext Transfer Protocol requests and block malicious attacks based on a dynamic policy which was composed by analyzing the outgoing HTML pages.[8] [9]
Later in June 2000 the company introduced AppScan the world's first Web Security Vulnerability Assessment solution.[10] Among the first clients for AppScan were Yahoo!,[11] Bank of America and AT&T.[12]