Palamida Awarded Patent for Document Similarity Metric

Award is the First Known to be Granted in the Composition Analysis Category

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. - August 26, 2009 -

Palamida, the leader in application security for open source, announced today that it has been granted a U.S. patent for “Determining a Document Similarity Metric.” The authors are Palamida founder Ray Walden and software engineer Jing Zhang. The award reflects the first known patent to emerge from the new application category termed Composition Analysis.

Composition Analysis focuses on software during its development cycle to identify various externally-sourced components incorporated into the software, and to flag any intellectual property and security vulnerability risks introduced by the use of these components. This application has taken on new significance over the past several years as development teams have turned to thousands of open source components available over the Web to speed development time and reduce costs.

The technological key to Composition Analysis is the ability to rapidly scan code under development and compare its contents to the large amount of known open source code. It is a specialized application of search technology in which each scan is comprised of a large number of search terms, each of which represents a small portion of the code being scanned.

Palamida’s patent covers the core of this specialized search, with new algorithms which compute a similarity metric based on coverage, count, clustering and uniqueness. As with any computerized search technique, the number of results matching the search criteria can be large, and the goal is to focus on those that are the most relevant to the search and to ignore those that are not. The Palamida feature that uses this technology, CodeRank, allows users to go directly to the most relevant results and ignore false positives. As a result of this patented technology, Palamida Enterprise Edition customers can spend less time analyzing results, and more time taking action to remediate any issues identified by the scan.

“We are very proud of the work that Ray and Jing did,” said Mark Tolliver, Palamida CEO. “With their contribution, we were able to set a solid foundation for our ongoing development work and establish Palamida as an innovator and leader in our market.”

Palamida provides the industry’s first application security solution exclusively for open source software. The Palamida Enterprise Edition uses component-level analysis to quickly identify and track undisclosed code and associated security vulnerabilities, as well as intellectual property and compliance issues. Using Palamida, organizations can cost-effectively manage and secure mission critical Web and software applications.

For more information visit: www.palamida.com.