Unlocking the Next Gen Exam Tech!
Secure, scalable, and verifiable exam delivery — engineered so integrity is something you can check, not something you're asked to trust.
For High stakes examsBorn at IIT Bombay. Built for India's exams.
Durjeya is incubated at SINE — the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, IIT Bombay, a leading cradle for deeptech ventures shaping India’s innovation landscape. We work from the RBTIC building on the IIT Bombay campus, and CORTEX carries that rigor into the one place India needs it most: the integrity of its examinations.
That association is not only corporate. Durjeya’s founders bring three decades across government and high-technology industries — including leading a multinational IT company focused on board examinations — and a doctorate with graduate studies at IIT Bombay.
"The biggest threats for our exams are remote answering and technical hacks."— S. Gopalakrishnan, Chairman, Staff Selection Commission — India's largest CBT-conducting agency (to NDTV, May 2026)
CORTEX features
The exam hall India trusts — fortified by mathematics anyone can verify. CORTEX carries the question paper from the board's vault to the candidate's desk under our granted patent, sealed the whole way, and returns every answer inside a cryptographic evidence chain a parent can check on a phone. Four properties carry the entire system:
Secure
The paper exists only as sealed ciphertext between the board and the candidate — nobody in between can read, copy or sell it. Responses return under the same seal.
Offline
No internet at the centre — nothing for an outage to stop, nothing for "remote answering and technical hacks" to reach. Proximity-authenticated delivery, device to device, and it works with RF jammers switched on.
Versatile
One platform, every mode — offline tablets, CBT centres, secure browsers, hybrid rollouts, and pen-paper exams alongside. The same evidence chain holds in each.
Intuitive
Candidates write the exam they have always known — same hall, same ritual, no new anxieties. Sealing, custody and verification happen invisibly underneath.
Sealed at every hand-over.
Readable only at the last.
Five walkthroughs follow a question paper out of the Board’s vault to a candidate’s desk, the response back again, the proof that is published every hour, the signing that happens on the device as an answer is tapped, and the verdict a candidate can check for themselves.
From vault to desk,
nothing in between can read it.
Almost every major leak happens before the first bell rings. CORTEX removes the opportunity — not with surveillance, but with custody.
01 · Sealed at origin
Encrypted before it leaves the examination authority — before any press, courier or strongroom touches it.
02 · Travels dark
Unreadable in transit and storage — to everyone, including the people carrying and guarding it.
03 · Opens at exam hour
Becomes readable only at the scheduled time, at the exam desk. Not a minute before. Nowhere else.
04 · Returns sealed
Responses come back under the same protection — ready for transparent, audit-ready evaluation.
⚖️ Patent-protected in India, published internationally — with more patents filed and in process. Technical briefings under NDA for authorities and evaluators. Full patent details →
Experience a New Era of exams with
Embedded Hi-tech
Secure end-to-end digital solution for:
Competitive Exams (MCQ based) — Higher-Ed Entrance and Recruitment and
Academic Exams (MCQ + pen-paper) — K-12 Board and University Term/Sem.
Our Story
In July 2022 — two years before the NEET paper-leak scandal broke — we filed a patent for a question almost nobody was asking yet: why must a question paper ever be readable to anyone before the exam hour?
Exams don't fail in the exam hall — they fail on the journey. Every press, strongroom and envelope is an act of faith in a human being, and faith is not a security architecture. So we engineered faith out —CORTEX: the evidence chain that turns an exam into proof a parent can check via scanning a QR code on their phone. We did not pivot to India's exam crisis. We were built before it — for it. Read our full story →
Our Mission
Merit alone decides. Everywhere. Every time.
To make examination integrity an engineering guarantee — not an annual hope. To replace "trust the system" with "check it yourself." To make sure one incident never again cancels the futures of crores of honest candidates. And to do it with honest engineering: claims we can demonstrate, scope we state plainly — built in India, at IIT Bombay, for the largest examination system on Earth.
WHY GO FOR CORTEX ?
Provable integrity — not promised
The paper a candidate opened, the answers they sealed and the score they were given are bound into one signed, cryptographic evidence chain — alter any of them and the mismatch shows. Every candidate leaves with a receipt checkable on any phone. Verify. Don't trust.
The leak window closed at delivery
Our patented method delivers the encrypted paper to locked devices over short-range, proximity-authenticated connections — no internet in the loop, no hall-wide signal to intercept, and it works with RF jammers switched on. The pre-exam theft opportunity is removed, not merely monitored.
Audit-ready, court-ready records
Signed, sealed, witnessed, published. Every custody event — even a device failure mid-exam — is a witnessed, photographed, certified procedure. When questions arise, the authority holds evidence, not explanations.
Incidents stay local. Merit stays protected.
Integrity is judged per candidate, so clean sessions stand and only affected ones are reviewed — ending the era where one incident forces millions of honest candidates into blanket cancellations and re-exams.
Simpler to run. Familiar to write.
Locked single-app devices, fleet-wide delivery at once, designed exception procedures — less manual work for administrators, while candidates experience the familiar exam they have always known.
The question paper, as everyone between the board and the candidate sees it.
See CORTEX, in motion.
Two short films — one for the exams India writes on paper, one for where they're headed.
Durjeya CORTEX — A NEAT Solution
The whole idea in one film: sealed delivery, offline conduct, verifiable fairness. Then see how it works →
Durjeya CORTEX — For Pen-Paper Exams
Most Indian exams are still written on paper — CORTEX protects those too with the solution AICTE recommends to its institutions. Why the paper's journey is the real battlefield: read the analysis →
Clear thinking on exam integrity.
NEET-UG goes digital in 2027: what the world's largest CBT transition must get right
The move from OMR to computer-based testing solves some problems — and creates new ones.
The paper's journey is the paper's weakness
Why almost every major leak happens before the exam begins — and why custody, not surveillance, is the fix.
Multi-session exams and normalisation, explained for parents
What happens when a whole cohort writes the same exam across days and shifts — and what keeps it fair.
FAQ
If the exam is offline, how does the question paper reach the exam hall?
Not over the internet — over a patented chain of authorisation (Indian Patent No. 572782). Inside the secured exam venue, the question paper passes from the authorising system to locked distributor devices, and on to each locked exam device, only across short-range, proximity-authenticated connections. Every device must prove its identity before it receives anything, the payload stays encrypted throughout, and in the near-field embodiments there is no hall-wide signal to intercept — delivery works with RF jammers switched on, including the ones a centre may run against smuggled phones.
Is CORTEX only for computer-based exams?
No. The evidence chain is mode-independent by design — offline tablets, CBT centres on a local network, secure-browser deployments, or a hybrid across a national footprint — and CORTEX supports pen-and-paper based exams alongside CBTs.
What happens if a device fails mid-exam?
A device failure is a designed recovery event — "not a second opportunity, not a fresh paper event, and not an invigilator-discretion event." The session freezes, the candidate's response journal is sealed at the last recorded event, and a witnessed, photographed, sealed hand-over moves the session to a verified standby device that must match the session's cryptographic record before it resumes. Lost time is compensated through formally certified grace time — nothing informal, nothing lost, no advantage created.
Can CORTEX scale to a national exam?
It is designed multi-million--scale ready. The patented method distributes the paper to many devices at once inside each venue, each centre operates fully offline with no central live dependency at exam time, and integrity is judged per candidate — so a local incident stays local, clean sessions stand, and only affected ones are reviewed.
Why believe this over every other "secure exam" claim?
We don't ask you to believe — that is the point. CORTEX turns the exam into evidence you can check yourself: the paper you opened, the answers you sealed and the score you were given are cryptographically bound, signed, sealed, witnessed and published, and every candidate leaves with a receipt verifiable on any phone using an open-source verifier. And we state the scope honestly: tamper-evident by design, not "tamper-proof" — guarantees stated as intended cryptographic behaviour, to be established by independent verification.