Safety for what arrives from outside
Proof a real person is there.
A live camera check that a recording or a generated face cannot answer.
Fresh random prompts every session, so there is nothing to rehearse.
Passive checks ask a model whether a video looks generated. Every generator is then trained until it does not.
Of the generated faces we tested satisfied a simple instruction to turn the head. The most common liveness challenge in the industry is close to free for an attacker.
Cognau internal evaluation.
So stop asking whether the video is fake. Ask it something only a live person can answer.
A short camera check, drawn at random, that a recording cannot satisfy.
Commit
Seal the prompts
Before the camera opens, the session draws its prompts at random and seals them. Your integration receives the sealed commitment when the session starts.
Reveal
One step at a time
Prompts are released live, each one moments before it appears on screen. Nothing downstream can be prepared in advance, and no recording made earlier can contain an answer to it.
Measure
Decide out of reach
Each response is judged against the prompt that was actually issued, away from the device. Your backend receives a pass or a fail and a confidence score, signed.
When a session finishes, you can open its commitments through the API and recompute them yourself: proof that the prompts were fixed before your user saw anything. Verifiable by you, not a claim you have to take on trust.
- Under 1 min
- for a typical check
- 3 ways in
- a one-line embed, a server API, or a shareable link
- $1.25
- per liveness check, billed on results
The verdict has value. The footage is a liability.
Identity documents and face images are exactly what attackers went looking for when they targeted a verification provider rather than its customers. We would rather not be holding them, so by default we are not.
Biometric data is special-category personal data under the GDPR, and in some US states individuals can sue over it directly. Keeping less is a product decision before it is a legal one.
Resting state
Deletion is the default
Nothing is kept because it might be useful later. Session material is written only where a step in the check has to read it back, and everything written carries a deletion deadline from the moment it exists.
Within 24 hours
An unfinished check leaves nothing
If somebody abandons a check, or it times out, or it is never scored, everything captured is deleted within a day. It backs no decision, so every hour it survived would be liability bought for nothing.
Not the recording
A finished check keeps a sample
A completed check keeps a few still images per prompt rather than the hundreds captured, because those few are the evidence behind a result somebody acted on. They expire on a published schedule.
Off by default
No face database
Proving that a person is present is a different question from recording which person. Recognising a returning face is an option a customer switches on for a stated reason, and it is off until they do.
Verification is the first product, not the company.
Cognau is building a safety layer for everything that reaches an organisation from outside. Three pillars, one question: can what just arrived be trusted? One of the three is live today. The other two are where we are going, and we will say so plainly until they ship.
People
Human verification
Verifying humans. Customers are live today: onboarding, account recovery and the actions worth stealing. Job candidates and help-desk callers come next, now that a convincing impostor costs an attacker almost nothing.
See how it works
Requests
Request approval
A payment or a change of bank details pauses until a real person approves it in the moment, rather than on the strength of a message that looked right. Not built yet, and next on the roadmap after verification.
Read what is planned
Content
Email security
Email and its attachments opened away from the employee machine, so a malicious file lands somewhere it can do nothing. Safe document opening belongs to the same pillar. Not built yet.
Read what is planned
Ready to secure your platform?
Confirm a real person is on the other end, before the decision that depends on it. Create an account and run your first check in the sandbox, free.