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CAPTCHA, H
OW
I
MPORTANT
I
T
I
S
?
Amal A. Al-SuwaidanKing Saud UniversityRiyadh, K.S.AP.O Box 291772, Riyadh 11362amalalsuwaidan@gmail.com
A
BSTRACT
Since browsing internet became a daily need for all people, which means it should satisfies the security and accessibility issues. CAPTCHA became an important part of internet browsing and it is used to prevent the bots illegal access to the web sites. On the other hand, CAPTCHA is inaccessible, especially for the blind persons, visually impaired or dyslexic. This paper is about CAPTCHA and its history, advantages,applications, disadvantages and future.
Keywords
Web accessibility, CAPTCHA accessibility, CAPTCHA and special needs people, and CAPTCHA alternatives.
1.I
NTRODUCTION
:
In this paper I will talk about CAPTCHA and some its related issues. At first I will talk about CAPTCHA historyand related work. Then I will talk about how to create CAPTCHA and how does CAPTCHA work. After that Iwill show CAPTCHA benefits. Then I will discuss the CAPTCHA accessibility survey. After that I will talk aboutCAPTCHA accessibility and brief discussing about some CAPTCHA alternatives. Finally, I will talk aboutCAPTCHA future.
2.CAPTCHA
BACKGROUND
 
AND
 
RELATED
 
WORK
:
Bots are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks thatare both simple and structurally repetitive at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone.Some kinds of bots are harmful when attacked a web site. In 1996, Moni Naor discuses several ways to verifythat a request comes from a human and not bots. In his paper "Verification of a human in the loop orIdentification via the Turing Test". Then in 1997, Primitive CAPTCHAs produced at AltaVista by Andrei Broderand his colleagues to prevent bots from adding URLs to their search engine. CAPTCHA is an acronym for"Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.". Then, in 2000, Luis vonAhn and Manuel Blum coined the term 'CAPTCHA', improved and publicized the notion, which included anyprogram that can distinguish humans from computers. They invented multiple examples of CAPTCHAs,including the first CAPTCHAs to be widely used, which were those adopted by Yahoo! but the trademarkapplication was abandoned on 21 April 2008 [1].The CAPTCHA can be described as a picture contains distorted letters to ensure that the user is a human notbots. These pictures can not be read by bots because CAPTCHA is resistant to OCR (Optical CharacterRecognition). e.g. (see figure 1 and figure 2).
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copiesare not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copyotherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission.The First Mini-Conference in Web Technologies and Trends (WTT)
 © 
2009 Information Technology Department, CCIS, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
 
Figure 1: Hotmail CAPTCHA Figure2: Yahoo! CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA spreads widely in the web sites. As a result, CAPTCHA must satisfy two main issues the securityand the accessibility. CAPTCHA already satisfies the security issues by providing a great protection frombots. On the other hand, CAPTCHA faces a big challenge with accessibility issue. Since, CAPTCHA rely onthe picture vision which could be hard to the normal users and impossible to the special needs users.A lot of internet users trying to avoid CAPTCHA and provide some alternative but until now CAPTCHA still themost popular. Matt May on his paper "Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA" discuses this topic from several ways andproduce some alternatives.
3.H
OW
 
DOES
CAPTCHA
WORK
?
CAPTCHA is fooling the bots by asking questions only human can answer it. CAPTCHA fooling bots bygenerating pictures contain distorted letters -different pictures with different letters in different shapes aregenerated- Then CAPTCHA asking the user to enter the letters shown in the picture. Bots can not recognizeeach letter alone. After the user submits the answer CAPTCHA validate the answer.
4.H
OW
 
TO
 
CREATE
CAPTCHA?
CAPTCHA can be written using some programming languages like PHP and ASP. The code should providethree main functions. First, the code should generate a random picture with different properties. Second,validate the user answer. Third, make these pictures secure. Also, there are many things to make the codemore reliable like" Rotate the text randomly, add random spaces in between characters, use a TTF fonts andchange the font randomly every time, use a random text and image size every time, use more advanced textdistortion and colours, move the lines randomly, store the password in a random cookie"[2]. In addition, thereare CAPTCHA creator programs which allow users to choose their CAPTCHA shapes.
5.CAPTCHA
BENEFITS
:
 
[3]
5.1CAPTCHA security services:
CAPTCHA provides several services in security, including:
•
Preventing Comment Spam in Blogs.CAPCHA prevents spam replays without asking the user to sign up.
•
Protecting Website Registration.Ensure that the users who sign up for free services such e-mail are human not bots.
•
Protecting Email Addresses from Scrapers.CAPTCHA hide the e-mail address and asked the users to enter the text in the picture to show the e-mail.This help to prevent scrapers from sending to the e-mails.
•
Online Polls.In online poll asking bots can vote thousand of times. CAPTCHA allows humans only to vote.
•
Preventing Dictionary Attacks.
 
CAPTCHAs can also be used to prevent dictionary attacks in password. The idea is simple: prevent acomputer from being able to iterate through the entire space of passwords systems by requiring it to solve aCAPTCHA after a certain number of unsuccessful logins.
•
Search Engine Bots.Since, search engine bots are usually belong to large companies, respect web pages that don't want to allowthem in. However, in order to truly guarantee that bots won't enter a web site, CAPTCHAs are needed.
•
Worms and SpamCAPTCHA protects e-mail from worm and spam by ensuring that the sender is a human not bot.
5.2ReCAPTCHA project:
ReCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows.Since solving CAPTCHA consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. ReCAPTCHA is trying tomake appositive use of this human effort. ReCAPTCHA does that by channelling the effort spent solvingCAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.Digitizing physical books is by scanning the book pages photographically, and then transformed into textusing "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). Since OCR is not perfect reCAPTCHA improves the process ofdigitizing books by sending each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and usedas a CAPTCHA.But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, system knows the correct answer by "giving the word that cannot be read correctly by OCR to a given user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is alreadyknown"[3], if the user answered the word already known correctly the system assumes their answer is correctfor the new one. Then, the system gives the same world to a number of other users to determine the correctanswer.
6.CAPTCHA
ACCESSIBILTY
 
SURVEY
:
In 7 December, 2008 CAPTCHA accessibility survey was created. The survey contains two parts focuses onCAPTCHA accessibility and some of it is alternatives. The survey covered 118 internet users for part 1 and111 internet users for part 2 the responders was from different abilities, ages, cultures and interested. Thecoming sections will discuss the left of CAPTCHA issues and the survey results. In addition, the full surveyresults are provided in the below graphs.
 
In general, Do you have any readingdifficulties (eye blind, dyslexia … etc)?
Yes, 17No, 101
020406080100120
Does CAPTCHA bother you?
Never, 17
Sometime74
Always, 27
01020304050607080
of 00

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