Submitted by-

Neha Arya
CS VI th Sem
Roll no: 0829210020
 INTRODUCTION

CAPTCHA Completely Automated Public

Turing test to tell
Computers and Humans Apart

A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by

generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer
programs cannot.
 CHARACTERISTICS
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.

• A CAPTCHA or Captcha  is a type of challenge-response test used
in computing to 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.

 First developed by Alta Vista in 1997.
 Yahoo partnered CMU to counter these threats in Messenger
chat service.

 Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum of CMU trademarked

CAPTCHA in 2000
 • What is a Turing 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 CAPTCHA

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 .
 Graphic based CAPTCHAs
- Requires user to perform image recognition test.

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.
 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.
 Re-CAPTCHA

Free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time
radio shows.
Re-CAPTCHA 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 an image and used
as a CAPTCHA.
This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot 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

1. Preventing Comment Spam in Blogs

2. Protecting Website Registration

3. Protecting Email Addresses From Scrapers

4. Online Polls

5. Preventing Dictionary Attack

6. Worms and Spam

 Constructing CAPTCHAs
 Things to keep in mind:

 Don’t store CAPTCHA solution in Web page’s metadata

 A CAPTCHA is no good if it doesn't distort

 Need a large database of different CAPTCHA questions

 Avoid repetition of questions

 Breaking CAPTCHAs

 Cracking CAPTCHAs through programs

 Convert CAPTCHA into greyscale

 Detect patterns in the image corresponding to characters
 If the program can only match a few of the letters, it might cross
reference those letters with a database of English words
 Then it would plug in likely candidates into the submit field. This
approach can be surprisingly effective.
 ISSUES RELATED TO CAPTCHA

 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

 Applications are varied– from stopping bots to character recognition &
pattern matching
 Some issues with current implementations represent challenges for future
improvements
 A step backward for CAPTCHA is still a step forward for AI -- every
defeat is also a victory