CAPTCHA: T
HE
S
ECURITY
T
HROUGH
O
BSCURITY
Reema Abdullah Al-abdullatif
A
BSTRACT
Forums, Blogs, Email addresses, video sharing sites and others have become a target to either commercial or non-commercial spam. Spammers use bots to crawl through websites and pick up email addresses, post spam or consume the accounts of them. Excessive server loads, illegal spam, theft of resources and many were all consequences of spamming. This paper talks about CAPTCHA as a solution to limit the spamming.
Keywords
CAPTCHA, security, spam.
1.I
NTRODUCTION
A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a programthat generates and grades tests that are human solvable, but intends to be beyond the capabilities of currentcomputer programs [1].
The term "CAPTCHA" was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopperand John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, they developed the first CAPTCHA to be used by Yahoo.
[2]. This technology is now almost a standard security mechanism for defending against undesirable Internetbots programs, such as those spreading junk emails and those grabbing thousands of free email accountsinstantly. It has found widespread application on numerous commercial web sites including Google, Yahoo,and Microsoft’s MSN. [3]The most common use of CAPTCHA on the web today is to try preventing the repeatedly automaticsubmission of forms by bots, usually for the purpose of spam. By adding a CAPTCHA to form, it can cut downon the amount of spam received via a contact form or can prevent bots from signing up for accounts on thewebsite.Spamming is among the top few reasons, which today’s webmasters have to deal with. In the other hand,CAPTCHA is among a few successful techniques which used by almost all of the web sites to control theautomated spamming activitiesThe most widely used CAPTCHA is the text-based schemes, which rely on text images distortion to makethem unrecognizable to recognition programs. There are many other types covered up next
.
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
Leave a Comment