10 Innovative Security Startups To Watch

Emerging Authentication, Cloud Security Technologies In Competition

Ten finalists are competing for the title of Most Innovative Company during the Innovation Sandbox program at the 2013 RSA Conference, Feb. 25. During the competition, each finalist will exhibit its technology and be judged by a panel that includes Asheen Chandna, partner at Greylock Partners; Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research; George Hoyem, investment partner at In-Q-Tel; Alastair Goldfisher, editor at Venture Capital Journal; and Gerhard Eschelbeck, CTO & SVP at Sophos.

Bromium

CEO: Gaurav Banga

Founded in 2011, Cupertino, Calif.-based Bromium positions its Bromium vSentry product as a hardware-based security technology to defend against targeted attacks. VSentry technology is aimed at physical and virtual desktops, which eliminates remediation by automatically discarding malware. Bromium LAVA (Live Attack Visualization & Analysis) provides malware analysis capabilities to incident responders.

Light Point Security

CEO: Beau Adkins

Baltimore-based Light Point Security said its technology helps defend against web-based malware. Light Point Web Enterprise is a secure web-browsing product that isolates each employee's browsing session within a one-time-use, server-based virtual machine that is destroyed immediately after use. It provides cloud-based malware protection, full traffic encryption and anonymity.

Nok Nok Labs

CEO: Phillip Dunkelberger

Nok Nok Labs launched on Feb. 12. It has developed a unified authentication infrastructure that the company believes one day could replace the traditional username and password to authenticate people. The technology can use a device's fingerprint sensors or webcams, Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chips, or voice biometrics to securely authenticate anyone, anywhere and to any device. The company is being led by Phillip Dunkelberger, who co-founded PGP, now part of Symantec. Nok Nok Labs joined PayPal, Lenovo, Validity, Agnito and Infineon to establish the FIDO Alliance, a nonprofit corporation organized to address the need for an open standard for interoperability of existing authentication solutions.

PrivateCore

CEO: Oded Horovitz

PrivateCore is attempting to build a different cloud-computing model. The company, founded in 2011, is building software that addresses privacy concerns in a public cloud-computing infrastructure. The company provides a secure hypervisor that enables the private execution of virtual machines on a public platform. This approach only allows the real owner of the virtual machine to access the data inside, and only with the right credentials (keys). PrivateCore's vCage protects any application on commodity x86 servers by encrypting data during program execution.

Remotium

CEO: Sinan Eren

Remotium is attempting to solve the bring your own device (BYOD) trend with virtual mobile infrastructure (VMI). Remotium said its virtual-instance technology runs mobile applications on public or private clouds and streams the visualization elements to the mobile devices. Content-sensitive enterprise applications such as email, calendar, contacts, browser, Salesforce.com, Box, Workday and others are instrumented on run-time to prevent data loss, intrusion and malware, the company said.

Silent Circle

CEO: Mike Janke

Silent Circle technology encrypts video, phone, text and email. The company was founded by Phil Zimmerman, who developed the PGP encryption code-base. PGP was acquired by Symantec in 2010. The company's encrypted data-transfer service was launched with the Silent Text smartphone app that allows users to send files of up to 60 MB. The data can be set to be deleted from both devices after a preset period. The company also provides a Silent Circle voice service.

Skyhigh Networks

Skyhigh Networks lets IT and security admins identify cloud services running on their networks and receive a detailed risk rating for each service. The company launches Feb. 25 at RSA Conference 2013. The company said it can apply a rating to more than 2,000 services. It enables the IT or security admin to block or apply policies to control use of specific services. Early customers include about 10 Fortune 500 customers, including Cisco, GE and Netflix.

Spotflux

CEO: Chris Naegelin

Spotflux launched in 2012 at SXSW. The company said its free service sends an individual's encrypted Internet traffic through its analytics to remove ads, tracking cookies and malware. The cloud-based service has no impact on responsiveness or battery life. The company said its technology is not a proxy and works on the entire Internet connection. It also is different from a VPN. No OS settings are required. The software works on Macs or PCs and is available for iOS devices. Support for Android is coming soon.

Victrio

CEO: Mark Lazar

Victrio integrates with existing call-center and fraud-management systems to provide an "identity confidence" score for incoming calls for authentication and fraud detection. The technology silently screens an individual's voice against a fraudster database sourced by historical fraud calls.

Wickr

Wickr is a free app for Apple iOS devices designed to send self-destructing messages and media while leaving no trace. Users of the app can send free text, photo, video, voice and PDFs to other Wickr users. The company recently added the ability to send documents and video from DropBox. It also supports file-storage services Google Drive and Box. Encrypted messages are deleted from the device by overwriting the data.