Institute of technical education & research

SEMINAR ON CAPTCHA
PRESENTED BY:
ABHISHEK SHANKAR CSE-D,0811012179

GUIDED BY: MR.K.VINOD KR Asst. Professor ,CSE

COORDINATED BY: Mr.Satya Ranjan Dash Asst. Professor ,CSE

1

Definition Background Types Applications Issues with CAPTCHAs Conclusion

 CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart Invented at Carnegie Mellon University by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum ,et. al A program that is a challenge-response test to separate humans from computer programs

 Generic CAPTCHAs distort letters and numbers Distorted letters are presented to the user User has to recognize the distorted letters

If guessed letters are correct , the user is inferred to be a human and allowed access
Else, user is a bot and denied access

 Humans are capable of reading the distorted and noisy text

Current OCRs cannot read them

What is a Turing test? Proposed by Alan Turing To test a machines level of intelligence Human judge asks questions to two participants, one is a machine, he doesnt know which is which If the judge cant 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

Why CAPTCHAs are needed? Tampering with online polls Spam emails Abusing free online accounts Tampering with rating on online shopping sites like Ebay , Amazon

Why visual captcha cant be outperformed?

Certain programs contain following functionality-

Pre-processing: Removal of background clutter and noise.

Segmentation: Splitting the image into regions which each contain a single character.

Classification: Identifying the character in each region.

the segmentation becomes nearly impossible with current software. Hence, an effective CAPTCHA should focus on the segmentation.

 Text Based:
Simple normal language questions:
What is the sum of three and thirty-five? If today is Saturday, what day is day after tomorrow? Which of apple, table ,crane is a fruit?

Very effective but needs a large question bank Cognitively challenged users find it hard

 Gimpy:
Designed by Yahoo and CMU Picks up 10 different words from the dictionary and distorts , fills it with noise User has to recognize at least 3 words If user is correct , he is admitted

 EZ-Gimpy:
Modified version of Gimpy Yahoo used this version in Messenger Has only 1 random string of characters Not a good implementation , already broken by OCRs

 MSNs Passport service CAPTCHAs:

Provided or Microsofts MSN services Uses 8 characters Warping is used to distort Very strong implementation , hasnt been broken yet It is segmentation resistant

Graphic based CAPTCHAs:

BONGO:

After M.M.Bongard , pattern recognition expert User has to solve a pattern recognition problem Has to tell the distinct characteristic between two sets of figures Then tell which set a given figure belongs to

 PIX: Uses a large database of labeled images Shows a set of images ,user has to recognize the common feature among those

 Audio CAPTCHAs:
Consists of downloaded audio clip User listens and enters the spoken word Helps visually disabled users Below is the Googles audio enabled CAPTCHA Not popular

 Protects online polls Prevents web registration abuse Prevents comment spams ,spam emails and dictionary attacks E-ticketing , prevents scalping

 Verify digitized books: reCAPTCHA

Used in Google Books Project Two words are shown , the program knows the first word If user knows the first word correctly , it assumes that the second unknown word will also be entered correctly Second word becomes known

 Helps advance AI knowledge CAPTCHAs are called Hard-AI problems A win-win scenario:
If CAPTCHAs are broken by a bot, a Hard AI problem is solved If its not yet broken , the current implementation is able to withstand attacks

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

Compatibility issues:
JavaScript needs to be activated in browsers Some may need Adobe Flash pluggin installed

 CAPTCHAs are an effective way to counter bots and reduce spam Help advance AI knowledge

Applications are varied- from stopping bots to character recognition and pattern matching
Some issues with current implementations represent challenges for future improvements

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA http://www.captcha.net/ http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/CAPTCHA.html http://computer.howstuffworks.com/captcha.htm