Shadi Khawandi, Firas Abdallah and Anis Ismail Faulty of Technology, Lebanese University, Lebanon

CAPTCHA is almost a standard security technology, and has found widespread application in commercial websites. There are two types: labeling and image based CAPTCHAs. To date, almost all CAPTCHA designs are labeling based. Labeling based CAPTCHAs refer to those that make judgment based on whether the question “what is it?” has been correctly answered. Essentially in Artificial Intelligence (AI), this means judgment depends on whether the new label provided by the user side matches the label already known to the server. Labeling based CAPTCHA designs have some common weaknesses that can be taken advantage of attackers. First, the label set, i.e., the number of classes, is small and fixed. Due to deformation and noise in CAPTCHAs, the classes have to be further reduced to avoid confusion. Second, clean segmentation in current design, in particular character labeling based CAPTCHAs, is feasible. The state of the art of CAPTCHA design suggests that the robustness of character labeling schemes should rely on the difficulty of finding where the character is (segmentation), rather than which character it is (recognition). However, the shapes of alphabet letters and numbers have very limited geometry characteristics that can be used by humans to tell them yet are also easy to be indistinct. Image recognition CAPTCHAs faces many potential problems which have not been fully studied. It is difficult for a small site to acquire a large dictionary of images which an attacker does not have access to and without a means of automatically acquiring new labeled images, an image based challenge does not usually meet the definition of a CAPTCHA. They are either unusable or prone to attacks. In this paper, we present the different types of CAPTCHAs trying to defeat advanced computer programs or bots, discussing the limitations and drawbacks of each.

CAPTCHAs, Labeling,Segmentation, Image recognition