Applications of CAPTCHA

Ramteen Talib

• CAPTCHA is a powerful tool

• Qingkun Ramteen Talib
• A CAPTCHA or Captcha is a type of challenge-response test used in to computing o ensure that the response is not generated by a computer.
• CAPTCHA  requires that the user type letters or digits from a distorted image that appears on the screen.
• Any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human else user is bot and denied access.
• It is sometimes described as a reverse Turing test.
• OCRs(Optical Character Recognition) are not able to read CAPTCHAs

• Characteristeics

A CAPTCHA is a means of automatically generating new challenges which:

• Current software is unable to solve accurately.
• Most humans can solve
• Does not rely on the type of CAPTCHA being new to the attacker.
• CAPTCHAs rely on difficult problems in artificial intelligence

• Origin

• First developed by Alta Vistain 1997.The term coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum and Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University and John Langford of IBM.
• Primitive CAPTCHAs seem to have been developed in 1997 by Andrei Broder, Martin Abadi, Krishna Bharat, and Mark Lillibridge to prevent bots from adding URLs to their search engine.

• Turning Test

• Proposed by Alan Turing
• To test a machine’s level of intelligence Human judge asks questions to two participants, one is a machine, he doesn’t know which is which, If judge can’t tell which is the machine, the machine passes the test.
• CAPTCHA employs a reverse Turing test,
• Judge = CAPTCHA program ,
• Participant = user
• if user passes CAPTCHA, he is human
• If user fails, it is a machine

• Types of CAPTCHAs
• 1.Text Based CAPTCHAs
• 2.Graphics Based CAPTCHAs
• 3.Audio or Sound Based CAPTCHAs
• Text Based
• Typically relay on sophisticated distortion of text images rendering them unrecognizable to the state of the art of the pattern recognition programs but recognizable by humans.
• Examples:
• Simple, normal language questions:
• What is sum of three and thirty-five?
• If today is Saturday, what is day after tomorrow?
• Very effective, needs a large question bank
• Cognitively challenged users find it hard .

• Gimpy:

• Originally designed by Yahoo and CMU.
• Based on human ability to read heavily distorted and corrupted text.
• works by choosing a certain number of words from a dictionary, and then displaying them corrupted and distorted in an image; after that Gimpy asks the user to type the words displayed in that image.

• EZ-Gimpy:

• A modified version of Gimpy.
• Used in Yahoo Messenger Service.
• It contains only one random character string.
• The word is random and not picked from the dictionary.
• Its not a good implementation of CAPTCHA, and already broken OCRs.

• MSN Passport service CAPTCHAs:
• its provided for Microsoft MSN services.
• uses 8 characters.
• Warping is used to distort.
• Its very strongly implemented and hasn·t been broken

• Graphic Based CAPTCHAs
• Requires user to perform image recognition test.

Examples:

• IMAGINATION:
• CAPTCHA that requires two steps to be passed.
• first step visitor clicks elsewhere on the picture that composed of a few images and selects in this way a single image.
• second step the selected image is loaded. It is enlarged but very distorted. Also variants of the answer are loaded on the client side. The visitor should select a correct answer from the set of the proposed words.

• BONGO:
• After M.M.Bongard, pattern recognition expert.
• User has to solve a pattern recognition problem.

• ASSIRA:
• Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access.
• It’s a HIP that works by asking users to identify photographs of cats and dogs.
• Difficult for computers but humans can accomplish it very quickly and accurately.

• Audio CAPTCHAs
• Require user to solve a speech recognition test.
• In this version of captcha letters are read aloud instead of being displayed in an image.
• Helps visually disabled users
• Below is the Google’s audio enabled CAPTCHA.

• 3D CAPTCHA
• 3DCaptcha is the “captcha nice to humans, bad to machines”.
• It is written in PHP.
• A new approach to captchas, using human’s spatial cognition abilities to differentiate humans from machines.
• It uses a markov-chain to generate words that resemble human language and are easy to type, yet avoid dictionary lookups.
• It filters profane language.
• It’s easy to deploy.

• Re-CAPTCHA
• Free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows.
• reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the
• Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher.
• Each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on animage and used as a CAPTCHA.
• This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a wordcannot be read correctly.

Working of reCAPTCHA:

• Two words are shown, one word is known as Control Word, and another one is known a questionable word.
• System assumes that if human types the control word correctly, the questionable word is also correct.
• The identification performed by each OCR program is given a value of 0.5 points, and each interpretation by a human is given a full point.
• Once a given identification hits 2.5 votes, the word is considered called.

Applications

• Preventing Comment Spam in Blogs
• Protecting Website Registration
• Protecting Email Address From Scrapers
• Online Polls
• Preventing Dictionary Attacks
• Search Engine Bots
• Worms and Spam
• Advancing Artificial Intelligence

• Called Hard-AI problems.
• CAPTCHA tests are based on open problems in artificial intelligence (AI).
• A win-win scenario:

• Either a CAPTCHA is not broken and there is a way to differentiate humans from computers.
• Or the CAPTCHA is broken and an AI problem is solved. Thus AI knowledge is advanced if CAPTCHAs are broken.

• V/S

• Constructing CAPTCHAs

Things to keep in mind:

• Don’t store CAPTCHA solution in Web page’s meta data
• A CAPTCHA is no good if it doesn’t distort
• Need a large database of different CAPTCHA questions
• Avoid repetition of questions

• CAPTCHA Logic:

• Generate the question
• Persist the correct answer
• Present the question to user
• Evaluate answer, if incorrect, start again-Generate a different CAPTCHA
• If correct, allow access to user

• Guidelines:
• Accessibility
• Image security
• Script security
• Security after widespread adoption
• Custom implementation or a general CAPTCHA?

• Breaking CAPTCHAs
• Cracking CAPTCHAs through programs
• Convert CAPTCHA into greyscale
• Detect patterns in the image corresponding to characters
• Or, read session files of that user and know the CAPTCHA word
• Solution: Only store a hash of the CAPTCHA word in session files

• Issues with CAPTCHAs

Usability issues

• W3C mandates
• Web to be accessible to all people
• Some CAPTCHAs are inaccessible to visually impaired, cognitively challenged people

Compatibility issues

• JavaScript may need to be activated in browsers
• Some may need Adobe Flash plugin installed

• Real World

Conclusion

• CAPTCHAs are an effective way to counter bots and reduce spam
• They serve dual purpose²help advance AI knowledge
• Applications are varied²from stopping bots to character recognition & pattern matching
• Some issues with current implementations represent challenges for future improvements