Oxford solves a world without captchas

Isis Software Incubator’s spin-out Oxford BioChronometrics has secured funding from private investors to launch its first product, NoMoreCaptchas. Neither the size of the investment nor the names of the investors have been disclosed.

The company has developed technology which gives websites the ability to recognise whether a visitor is a human being or a spam bot. According to its own statistics, the company claims 95.6% of all logins are attempted by spam bots. The only way currently available to thwart such automated programs are captchas, which usually consist of distorted letters that the user has to recognise and type into a text field before being allowed to proceed.

Proprietary software records a user’s input and creates a signature. Dubbed e-DNA – electronically defined natural attributes – the signature is unique to each user and cannot be replicated by another user or a spam bot.

The algorithms have been developed by Adrian Neal and his co-founders. Neal holds a master’s degree in software engineering and is a postgraduate cryptographics expert at Oxford. Long-term, the company is hoping to use e-DNA to make passwords obsolete.

Neal, founder and CEO at Oxford BioChronometrics, said: “Using markers that distinguish the behaviour of humans from spam bots, our software reveals who or what is knocking on the door of any site or app. We found that at least 96.5% of these attempts to login are by bots, not human users. We can also determine whether ads are being clicked on by bots or humans, providing assurance to online advertisers that their budgets are not being wasted on bots and are actually being seen by humans. We can detect human bots and bot farms, which is a hugely important step for firms wanting to manage their online advertising cleverly and effectively.”