HoundDog.ai - Shift-Left: Data's Best Defence

What is HoundDog.ai?

HoundDog.ai is a lightweight, ultra-fast static code scanner designed to implement a proactive 'shift-left' strategy for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) leak prevention and privacy compliance. It helps organizations integrate data security and privacy controls from the start, providing unparalleled coverage and accuracy by leveraging the power of AI.

The platform seamlessly integrates into developer workflows, offering CI/CD integrations, surfacing findings in security dashboards, and sending actionable notifications. HoundDog.ai runs anywhere, from CLI to CI/CD, ensuring sensitive data protection at the speed of development.

Features

PII Vulnerability Detection: Stop PII/PHI leaks in logs, files, cookies, tokens, and third-party apps.
Sensitive Datamap: Track PII dataflows and obtain a PII inventory.
Sensitive Data Flow Visualization: Visualize the flow of PII data across files and track storage mediums and third-party applications.
Privacy Compliance Automation: Generate RoPA effortlessly and detect DPA violations.
Alerts & Issue Tracking: Get alerts for new vulnerabilities, DPA violations, or when sensitive PII data elements are added.
CI/CD Integration: Integrates with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and more.
Security Dashboard Integrations: Surface findings in GitHub and GitLab security dashboards.
IDE Plugins (Enterprise Plan): Real-time IDE analysis to detect and remediate PII leaks.

Use Cases

Shift-Left Sensitive Data Protection: Continuously detect PII leaks at the code level.
Shift-Left Privacy Compliance Automation: Track data flows and generate a RoPA effortlessly.

FAQs

What programming languages does HoundDog.ai support?

The scanner supports Java, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Kotlin, Ruby, SQL, GraphQL, and OpenAPI / Swagger, with imminent expansions to Go and others.
How are the number of developers measured?

A developer is someone who made a commit to your organization's code repository scanned by HoundDog in the past month.
Is private source code shared with HoundDog.ai, Inc?

No. The HoundDog.ai scanner runs either locally or fully in your CI pipeline, and your source code never leaves your computer or CI environment. If you use our cloud platform, only metadata related to security findings will be sent to the HoundDog.ai cloud service. However, this is also optional, as many customers can integrate the scanner into their CI pipelines and surface the security findings on security dashboards without sending any metadata to the HoundDog.ai Cloud Platform.
How is AI incorporated into your workflow, and is the source code exposed to a public LLM model?

Our scanner includes a comprehensive library of predefined definitions for sensitive data, covering most PII, PIFI, and PHI data. For more extensive coverage, you also have the option to enable AI validation. **Our previous AI workflow, which relied on OpenAI, has been discontinued as we are developing a new workflow using a lightweight, open-source LLM model. This model can be deployed within your cloud account or on your on-premises infrastructure. The AI workflow processes only the discovered tokens (e.g., class names, variables, functions, methods, etc.) to determine whether they potentially handle sensitive data. As a result, the actual source code is not shared with the LLM model during processing. The new AI workflow will be available in Q2 2025.
Does your scanner detect actual sensitive data in code (e.g. exposed secrets or social security numbers)?

No. Our scanner detects code segments that handle with sensitive data. It identifies the lines of code where the code logic is designed to collect, process or store sensitive data such as personally identifiable information, personally identifiable financial information, personal health information.