In 2003 Sanctum was merged with Watchfire and the company was subsequently acquired by IBM.[2]
History
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]
The AppShield product was an early Web application Firewall.[8] AppShield was conceptualized by Eran Reshef and Gili Raanan and was introduced to the market in 1999.[9] AppShield worked by inspecting incoming HTTP requests and blocking malicious attacks based on a dynamic policy which was composed by analyzing the outgoing HTML pages.[10][11][12] A 2002 ZDNet article noted that in the three years following its launch, it had been used by 60 Fortune 100 companies.[13] Watchfire acquired Sanctum in 2004, and subsequently sold the intellectual property for AppShield to F5 Networks, which discontinued the product in favor of its competing TrafficShield product.[14]
^US20050114705A1, Reshef, Eran; Raanan, Gil & Solan, Eilon, "Method and system for discriminating a human action from a computerized action", issued 2005-05-26
