NuCaptcha is an early fraud detection service which utilises behavior analytics to provision threat appropriate, animated video

CAPTCHA A CAPTCHA ( , a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. The term was coined in 2003 b ...

s. NuCaptcha is developed and operated by

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

-based firm NuData Security. Static image-based CAPTCHAs are routinely used to prevent automated sign-ups to websites by using text or images of words disguised so that

optical character recognition Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a sc ...

(OCR) software has trouble reading them. However, in common CAPTCHA systems, users fail to correctly solve the CAPTCHA 7%25% of the time. NuCaptcha uses animated video technology that it claims make puzzles easier for humans to solve, but harder for bots and hackers to decipher.

Technology

NuCaptcha attempts to solve usability of static image-based CAPTCHAs using two main technologies: 1) video animation to display CAPTCHA puzzles, and 2) a behaviour analysis system to monitor interactions with the platform. # Video animation. CAPTCHAs are displayed as a video, and rendered in the web browser. A variety of technologies can be used to display the animated CAPTCHA, such as Flash video, HTML5, or GIF. Standard CAPTCHA techniques such as character crowding, once animated, are easier for humans to detect because of an innate motion-detecting ability. # Behavior analysis. Using machine-learning algorithms, NuCaptcha monitors platform interactions to tune the security of each CAPTCHA delivered to the user. Suspected attackers are given progressively more secure CAPTCHAs.

Security

Security researcher

Elie Bursztein Elie Bursztein, born 1 June 1980 in France, is a French computer scientist and software engineer. He currently leads Google’s Security and Anti-Abuse Research Team. Education and early career Bursztein obtained a computer engineering degree ...

demonstrated a practical attack against NuCaptcha's video CAPTCHA scheme by employing

optical flow Optical flow or optic flow is the pattern of apparent motion of objects, surfaces, and edges in a visual scene caused by the relative motion between an observer and a scene. Optical flow can also be defined as the distribution of apparent veloci ...

techniques to isolate individual CAPTCHA characters. The proposed attack is able to break the video CAPTCHAs in more than 90% of cases. In response, NuCaptcha noted that Bursztein’s findings underscore the need for CAPTCHA puzzles to be part of a larger security construct, such as behavior monitoring to assess the risk of individual users. NuCaptcha also pointed out that the CAPTCHAs analyzed in Bursztein's blog post were middle-security puzzles focused on usability, and not the stronger puzzles presented to high-risk users. In addition to this, NuCaptcha noted that the optical flow technique relies on static non-animated features of the puzzle. Changes were made to NuCaptcha puzzles to remove the static non-animated features.

Application

NuCaptcha APIs are currently available in

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

, .NET, and

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

. Plugins are available for

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

, Drupal, Codelgniter,

vBulletin vBulletin is a proprietary Internet forum software package sold by MH Sub I, LLC doing business as vBulletin (formerly Jelsoft Enterprises and vBulletin Solutions). It is written in PHP and uses a MariaDB or MySQL database server. Similar pro ...

, and

phpBB phpBB is an Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name "phpBB" is an abbreviation of ''PHP Bulletin Board''. Available under the GNU General Public License, phpBB is free and open-source. Features of phpBB include ...

. In October 2011, NuCaptcha announced its CAPTCHA solutions for mobile devices across all platforms, including Android and

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

References

External links

NuCAPTCHA homepage
Online companies of Canada Anti-spam Human-based computation Turing tests Access control software Computer security companies {{Web-stub