CAPTCHAs - Not dead

August 14, 2008 11:13 pm by Markus.

I recently attended a talk where the authors claimed that the CAPTCHA technology (the squiggly letters they make you type in whenever you sign up for anything) is dead and defeated. I disagree. In the talk, they demonstrated how to break a couple of “home-brew” captcha-implementations they found on the internet. Most of them were - not surprisingly - not very good. I think this is almost comparable to people inventing there own encryption algorithms.

All the implementations they broke were either insecure implementations (accepting solutions several times, hiding the answer in an invisible form field etc.) or were simply writing numbers in images with little or no distortion. The audio captcha they broke was simply reading numbers with a little bit of clicking noise in the background. Those are all very simple. What is supposed to make “real” captchas hard is that they are hard to segment - compare the phpBB captcha with the one from Yahoo. In the later you will have problems separating the letters for your OCR. A good audio captcha overlays music, chatter or other noise that is hard to separate from the code being read.

Just like home brew cryptography, it is probably a good idea to use an established technology (think reCAPTCHA) that was made by people with a background in OCR. Edit: A nice recap of how well the reCAPTCHA project is coming along is in ArsTechnica.

Posted in Machine Learning, Security | Print | 1 Comment »