• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.55-64
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• 2015

We propose statistical methods for evaluating the efficiency of CAPTCHA. Most people unfairly assumed that machines are not capable at reading precisely. This fact leads to the invention of CAPTCHA, a distorted word or short phase, which is designed to thwart computers and separate human from machines. However, advances in image recognition technologies mean that machines are constantly getting better at recognizing CAPTCHA. This forces CAPTCHA designers to design even more difficult CAPTCHAs to prevent their systems from being gamed by malicious bots. However, this arm race has an unintended side effect on the common users. Many CAPTCHAs are now so hard that many people are unable to read them. This obviously conflicts with the original purpose that CAPTCHA was invented in the first place. Our analysis shows that some CAPTCHAs are more users friendly. In particular, Yahoo-style CAPTCHA is the most friendliness. This suggests that a good CAPTCHA could be a simple text with some distortion that prevents machines from correctly segmenting characters.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartC
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• v.17C no.1
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• pp.27-36
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• 2010

In Web registration pages and online polling applications, CAPTCHA(Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Human Apart) is used for distinguishing human users from automated programs. Text-based CAPTCHAs have been widely used in many popular Web sites in which distorted text is used. However, because the advanced optical character recognition techniques can recognize the distorted texts, the reliability becomes low. Image-based CAPTCHAs have been proposed to improve the reliability of the text-based CAPTCHAs. However, these systems also are known as having some drawbacks. First, some image-based CAPTCHA systems with small number of image files in their image dictionary is not so reliable since attacker can recognize images by repeated executions of machine learning programs. Second, users may feel uncomfortable since they have to try CAPTCHA tests repeatedly when they fail to input a correct keyword. Third, some image-base CAPTCHAs require high communication cost since they should send several image files for one CAPTCHA. To solve these problems of image-based CAPTCHA, this paper proposes a new CAPTCHA based on both image and text. In this system, an image and keywords are integrated into one CAPTCHA image to give user a hint for the answer keyword. The proposed CAPTCHA can help users to input easily the answer keyword with the hint in the fused image. Also, the proposed system can reduce the communication costs since it uses only a fused image file for one CAPTCHA. To improve the reliability of the image-text fusion CAPTCHA, we also propose a dynamic building method of large image dictionary from gathering huge amount of images from theinternet with filtering phase for preserving the correctness of CAPTCHA images. In this paper, we proved that the proposed image-text fusion CAPTCHA provides users more convenience and high reliability than the image-based CAPTCHA through experiments.