Encryption startup Vera locks down transferred documents

In Silicon Valley, the recruiting game is extremely competitive, according to Ron Harrison, founder of Jivaro Professional Headhunters, a specialist in placing technology candidates.

In some cases, Harrison said the difference between getting nothing and a US$30,000 fee has come down to the few slim minutes between when one recruiter sent a resume to a company and a competing recruiter did.

Its a dirty business, Harrison said in a phone interview.

Recruiting is complicated by the fact that companies may share resumes, even if the receiving company isnt a client of the recruiter. Essentially, it means a recruiter loses its intellectual property through a gaping hole: an unencrypted document can be sent to anyone.

But Harrisons company is one of 10 trying software from a startup named Vera that aims to lock down documents transferred over email or other file-sharing services such as Box or Dropbox.

Cofounder Ajay Arora said Vera addresses a common enterprise problem: once a document leaves a companys network, its just out there for anyone to see who receives itor intercepts it.

While there is a lot of software out there that tackles this problem, Arora said he wanted to create a product that is very easy to use and doesnt interrupt the workflow of employees. Harrison, for example, said he was up and running in a few minutes with Vera, and it was easy for his employees to use.

With a right click on a file, a set of policies can be attached to, for example, a resume. The resume is encrypted, with the decryption key passed only to the authorized recipient, who doesnt have to install Veras software.

The document wont open if it is forwarded to someone else. It can also be time-bombed, or locked up after a predetermined amount of time, or blocked from being printed. Copy-and-pasting can also be stopped.

Vera uses AES 256-bit encryption to scramble a file, and then puts a metadata wrapper around it that contains the policies attached to it. The metadata wrapper phones back to Veras servers to make sure the authorized recipient is opening it, and then a symmetric key is securely transferred from Veras servers to the recipient to decrypt it, Arora said.

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Encryption startup Vera locks down transferred documents