The company behind an innovative hack-proof solution for protecting sensitive information has raised US$1million (£696,000) for the launch of its first commercial product.

Silicon Safe, which has an engineering centre at Adastral Park, near Ipswich, claims its Password Protect device would have prevented recent high-profile data breaches at companies such as Ashley Madison, eBay and Facebook.

It has now secured the necessary seed funding, from a number of private investors, to launch the product on to the market in March.

Password Protect uses patent-pending computing architecture to store password data in hardware. This means that hackers cannot apply any of the techniques normally used to attack software in order to steal data and passwords from conventional databases.

Users’ login details are sent to Password Protect for authentication and it simply indicates success or failure; the password is not revealed.

Nick Lowe, chief executive of Silicon Safe, said: “It’s clear from the recent spate of high-profile password breaches that conventional security techniques, based on commodity hardware and software, have failed.

“Companies are still suffering the reputational damage and remediation costs from these breaches. What we are doing is approaching this problem from a completely new perspective.

“With Password Protect, data is placed ‘beyond reach’ in a dedicated hardware appliance, in which information is stored and compared but never revealed. Once stored in the appliance, all the passwords an organisation holds cannot be accessed, extracted or stolen, only compared.”

Each appliance can securely store up to 64million passwords. Other types of sensitive data, such as credit card numbers and biometric information, can be stored and verified in the same way.