Home / Founders / Arshan Dabirsiaghi
Dabirsiaghi co-founded Contrast Security and wrote the AntiSamy security library before starting Pixee, which turns findings from existing scanners into fixes developers merge.
Arshan Dabirsiaghi is co-founder and CTO of Pixee, a Baltimore, Maryland, company that sorts the findings from code scanners, drops the ones that cannot be exploited, and opens pull requests that fix the rest.
Writing Security Tools for Developers
He made his name in application security with open-source tools. He released AntiSamy, a library that cleans user-supplied HTML so it cannot carry attacks, and JavaSnoop, a tool for testing Java applications, according to the Application Security Podcast. Pixee says its founders also helped create ESAPI, a widely used security library.
Co-founding Contrast Security
He co-founded Contrast Security with Jeff Williams and served as its Chief Scientist. Contrast instrumented running applications to spot attacks and flaws, and Pixee says the team helped build it into a billion-dollar security platform. Watching customers' lists of unfixed issues grow there shaped his next company.
Building Pixee Around Fixes
He and Surag Patel, a former Contrast executive, started Pixee to close what they call the resolution gap: scanners find far more problems than teams can fix. Pixee released Codemodder, an open-source framework for automated code changes, so others could build their own fixes. He has said his hiring practice is to have a wide group interview every candidate, with any interviewer able to say no.
