Layers of Security
adCAPTCHA is built on four core security pillars designed to make automated attacks impractical while maintaining a seamless experience for real users. These layers work together to provide a robust defence against bots, ensuring that only approved humans can pass through.
Media Varience
Traditional CAPTCHAs rely on predictable patterns, making them vulnerable to machine learning-based attacks. adCAPTCHA instead leverages the ever-changing media that businesses themselves create to promote their brands. By relying on continuously updated, dynamic content, bots cannot rely on a single recognition model, forcing attackers into a constantly shifting landscape.
How It Works
- Challenges are sourced from fresh, real-world promotional media created by businesses.
- Interactive elements require real-time engagement, making automated solving difficult.
- Accessibility-friendly options ensure usability for all real users while maintaining security.
Pathways
Instead of presenting a single static challenge, adCAPTCHA allows for an immense variety of challenge pathways. The system offers more than 409 billion paths that puzzle pieces in our challenges can move along. Even if two challenges use the same piece of media, they have different solutions. Every challenge served by the adCAPTCHA system is unique, making it impossible for bots to precompute solutions.
How It Works
- Each challenge path is unique per session, preventing attackers from pre-solving or memorising solutions.
- Adapts dynamically based on real-time signals, ensuring a fluid but secure experience.
- No multi-step verification—every challenge is a single interaction designed for efficiency and security.
Computational Processing
To increase the cost of automated attacks, adCAPTCHA incorporates proof-of-work mechanisms. Bots must perform additional computational tasks before attempting to solve a challenge, making large-scale attacks inefficient.
How It Works
- Users must complete a lightweight cryptographic challenge that is negligible for humans but computationally expensive for bots.
- The proof-of-work difficulty can scale dynamically based on attack patterns.
- This approach deters bot farms by forcing them to allocate costly resources per request.
Behavioural Analysis
Instead of relying solely on static challenges, adCAPTCHA continuously evaluates how users interact with challenges. Human-like behaviour patterns are rewarded with easier challenges, while suspicious interactions trigger additional scrutiny.
How It Works
- Tracks natural human inputs like mouse movements, touch interactions, and typing cadence.
- Uses real-time analysis to detect bots mimicking human patterns.
- Adjusts challenge difficulty dynamically based on behavioural confidence scores.
A Multi-Layered Defence
By combining media variance, adaptive pathways, computational processing, and behavioural analysis, adCAPTCHA makes bot-driven attacks costly, unpredictable, and ineffective. Each pillar strengthens the overall security model, ensuring that legitimate users can pass easily while automated systems struggle.