Have your ever tried changing your password in Google Accounts or tried to log onto Facebook with multiple attempts with a wrong password. Inadvertently, you would have more or less come across an authentication page, that asks you to enter the numerals or alpha-numerals from an image provided. These images are known as captchas and are designed specifically to ensure that the login information and the personal information of an user is safe from prying eyes and that the computer at the other end the line is infact being operated by a human and not by phishing bots.

These picture captchas although quite effective are infact getting older by the day and could soon be breached, creating unimagined havoc on social network and email accounts and could also lead to more serious issues such as, identity theft etc. However, a team of scientists at the Tel Aviv University in Israel are now working to find a solution to this problem and have come up with an experimental solution, that of multimedia captchas, that would be based on audio and video, instead of alphabets and numerals.

The all new multimedia captchas will be based on a certain technology that, creates and then displays the images of moving objects, thus rendering guesses and possible combinations useless. Such innovative technology can then be used by online security firms to create near fool proof moving captchas that only a human user will be able to decipher and the possibility of a bot cracking such captchas would become nil.

According to Danny Cohen-Or (Professor, School of Computer Sciences, Tel Aviv University),

“Humans have a very special skill that computer bots have not yet been able to master. We can see what’s called an ‘emergence image’ – an object on a computer screen that becomes recognizable only when it’s moving – and identify this image in a matter of seconds. While a person can’t ‘see’ the image as a stationary object on a mottled background, as it moves we can recognize and process it.”

Via Tech Radar.