New Venture From Lucent Technologies, Lumeta Corp., Provides Enterprise Network Management and Security Services

Business Wire, March 27, 2001

Business Editors

MURRAY HILL, N.J. & SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 27, 2001

Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Bill Cheswick Speaks at PCForum 2001

Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) today announced a new venture, Lumeta Corporation, that offers enterprise network management and security services. Lumeta's services provide a comprehensive definition of a company's IP (Internet Protocol) network infrastructure, which allows CIO's and CFO's to maximize security efficiency and productivity. The company was announced at Esther Dyson's PCForum 2001 held this week in Scottsdale, Ariz.

A team of former Bell Labs scientists, including Bill Cheswick, an authority on network security, designed Lumeta's network security services and products. These products - Lumeta(SM) Network Discovery and Lumeta(SM) Firewall Analyzer - will enable companies to manage the changes, and therefore the risks, in their intranets.

Lumeta's definition of the composition and state of an enterprise IP network and firewall rules will be valuable to many companies because traditional analysis and assessment tools for global, dynamic enterprise networks have inherent limitations. Typically, the effectiveness of these tools is based on the flawed assumption that there is an accurate census of the enterprise's network connections, routers, hosts and firewall policies. But in most cases, the number of connections and systems attached to the network is significantly underestimated, opening the door to potentially dangerous security breaches.

Headquartered in Somerset, New Jersey, Lumeta received its first-round funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and the meVC Draper Fisher Jurvetson Fund I (NYSE: MVC). Lucent retains a minority ownership position in Lumeta through its New Ventures Group.

"Lumeta is another example of how Lucent is taking full advantage of Bell Labs technologies, commercializing some ideas through an internal venturing path," said Tom Uhlman, president, New Ventures Group.

The technology behind Lumeta's products originated in 1997, when Cheswick began to collect Internet routing data. Cheswick. and Hal Burch, now a senior researcher at Lumeta, designed a tree-like map of this data, showing more than 65,000 end points and thousands of Internet interconnection nodes. Later, Steven Branigan, now Lumeta vice president of engineering, joined the team to develop similar maps for intranets.

"Lumeta queries the network at the IP (Internet Protocol) level to discover and explore the topology of the network. This information is critical for management - because you can't secure what you don't know about," said Cheswick. "Our visual depictions of the data we uncover are an especially effective communication tool for the CIO."

Avishai Wool, a co-founder of Lumeta who was also from Bell Labs Research, brought with him technology to analyze firewalls and translate complex rules into explicit, high-level reports.

"Our product is the only firewall analyzer available that tests all possible combinations of addresses, services and policy," said Cheswick. "We can examine 2104 possible packet combinations without sending a single packet to a production machine."

Lumeta's comprehensive solutions define a network's topology and discover vulnerabilities in the network. These solutions also work with firewalls in finding misconfigurations as well as links that bypass firewalls to connect directly to the Internet.

"Our three-year Internet mapping project led to new techniques for exploring intranet topologies efficiently," said Cheswick. "Our service offers CIO's new data about the safety of VPN links, business partners, telecommuters, and the hosts supporting Web-based commerce. We have found anomalies in a variety of large corporate networks, including some of the best-run intranets in the business. Our firewall analyzer accelerates and simplifies the configuration audit of a firewall."

"For the year 2001, security remains a hot market because businesses are realizing that security can enable e-business. Lumeta understands this," said Charles Kolodgy, research manager for Internet security at IDC. "Their goal is to develop and deliver a product that will leverage security to deliver extra business value."

About Lumeta Network Discovery

Lumeta Network Discovery (LND) helps manage the risks and the changes that arise from today's business actions by providing essential knowledge of enterprise IP networks. LND uses patent-pending software to scan a network from the inside in order to discover and define an enterprise network.

This process exposes vulnerabilities that cannot be found using traditional management tools, giving CIOs greater control over their IT assets. LND has created application solutions for Risk, Change and Asset Management.

About Lumeta Firewall Analyzer

Lumeta Firewall Analyzer (LFA) translates obscure firewall rules into clear statements of operational policy so an administrator knows what the firewall really excludes. Networks change so frequently that managers lose track of firewall-filtering rules. The rules themselves are very difficult to understand with visual inspection. LFA translates these rules into an easy-to-read report that enables managers to explicitly see what traffic is getting into which Host Groups via which ports. LFA also tests outbound traffic, an ideal technique to reduce unauthorized employee activity.