One of the most nervewracking and tedious parts of developing a Web site is making sure that it is safe from data theft and other security breaches. Taipei-based startup Lucent Sky‘s mission is to make cyber security easier for developers. The company says its software CLEAR is the first commercially available program for automatic application vulnerability mitigation.
Now available in a hardware version for enterprise use and a developer edition through the company’s Web site, CLEAR helps ensure the security of Web sites by looking for weaknesses in its coding and then presenting developers with secured source code that is ready for deployment.
“The difference between what we do and other Web security tools is that we are able to automatically mitigate vulnerabilities. We upload source code to a cloud or locally deployed server and scan it to automatically detect and mitigate,” says Melinda Jacobs, Lucent Sky’s operations director. “Other solutions can only discover vulnerabilities.”
The hardware version of Lucent Sky CLEAR Enterprise Edition can automatically secure Web applications at a rate of up to 200 vulnerabilities per second. The developer edition of Lucent Sky CLEAR, which is available for sale to developers working individually or within organizations, checks for cross-site scripting and privacy violations, which Lucent Sky says accounts for 90 percent of flaws in most Web sites.
The company was founded in January 2012 by Jim Liu and Scott Wu, both of whom previously worked as cyber security consultants. Liu began developing CLEAR when he repeatedly encountered the same vulnerabilities in clients’ Web sites. Originally meant to help Liu speed up the process of identifying flaws in source code, Lucent Sky CLEAR was made available for sale in March 2012. Lucent Sky has since worked with clients including departments of Taiwan’s military and government, a Fortune Global 500 company and several firms within the financial industry.
“We found it to be particularly useful for banks because they have a large amount of data that is rapidly updating and there are a lot of consumer security concerns with online banking that make it a good fit for automatic vulnerability mitigation software like CLEAR,” says Jacobs.
The company received seed funding from Startup Labs and Yushan Ventures and is currently raising an angel round.