Pramana’s security framework enables enterprises to distinguish human communications from software-generated activity, thereby verifying legitimate and desired Internet use and thwarting fraudulent activity. The company is a GT Venture Lab Graduate, was recognized as one of the Top Ten Innovative Companies in TAG’s recent Georgia Technology Summit, and has been mentioned in Forbes. It is funded by prominent Atlanta-based angels and headed by Sanjay Sehgal, President & CEO (rightmost in the photo above).
According to the company, human usage of the Internet has been overtaken by unauthorized software agents that generate 95% of all emails, over 92% of blog posts, over 20% of advertising clicks, and millions of fraudulent social network communications each day. They steal identities, bias polls and contests, defraud customers, ruin games and virtual communities, and can undermine the experience people expect when using the Web.
(Don’t worry, this blog post is being written by a human. We hope it’s a good experience for you.)
Pramana’s “HumanPresent™“ competition includes the following:
- CAPTCHA (scribbled characters, which we use for our comments below)
- Authentication Solutions (e.g. verify an image or answer a challenge question, as commonly used in banking software)
- Content Analytics (evaluation of incoming content for validity)
HumanPresent™ has two components: one is the detection of real-time transactions and the other is a self learning algorithm that examines keystrokes to deter spoofing. The framework can be easily customized to meet the growing needs of different markets. For example, one application can enhance or replace CAPTCHAs, to create a more reliable and less intrusive gateway for entering a website or creating an account. Another can validate actions or movements to prevent cheating in games. A third can parse human actions within a site in order to prevent “man-in-the-middle” attacks on financial sites.
HumanPresent™ technology is positioned as being
- Non-intrusive and invisible to the user experience,
- Specifically filtering out undesired automated inputs on a real-time basis.
- Reducing demand on server resources by pre-empting false negative and brute-force attacks
- Going beyond entry point barriers, such as passwords or CAPTCHAs, to provide a secure environment of human-issued inputs.
The success stories of Web 2.0 are sites built on crowd sourcing; user generated content and user voting/rating systems. Sites such as Youtube, Digg, and Facebook provide mashups of content sources along with a platform for interaction and participation. Inherent in this model is the assumption that each “user” is an individual participating in a community. The success of Web 2.0 has made it a prime target for spammers, vandals and hackers who want to exploit the trust implicit in this ecosystem. This is the problem that Pramana is successfully addressing.
