Over the last years, most websites where users can register (e.g., email providers and social networks) adopted CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) as a countermeasure for automated attacks. The battle of wits between designers and attackers of CAPTCHAs led to current ones being annoying and hard to resolve for users, while still being vulnerabl...

CAPTCHA has been widely deployed by commercial web sites as a security technology for purposes such as anti-spam. A common approach to evaluating the robustness of CAPTCHA is the use of machine learning techniques. Critical to this approach is the acquisition of an adequate set of labeled samples, on which the learning techniques are trained. However, such a sample labeling task is difficult fo...

We explore the robustness and usability of movingimage object recognition (video) captchas, designing and implementing automated attacks based on computer vision techniques. Our approach is suitable for broad classes of moving-image captchas involving rigid objects. We first present an attack that defeats instances of such a captcha (NuCaptcha) representing the state-ofthe-art, involving dynami...

In this paper, we present a novel watermarking scheme to ensure the authenticity of digital images. Our authentication technique is able to detect malicious tampering of images even if they have been incidentally distorted by basic image processing operations. The image protection is achieved by the insertion of a secret author’s identification key in the image wavelet coefficients by their sel...

Providing security for webservers against unwanted and automated registrations has become a big concern. To prevent these kinds of false registrations many websites use CAPTCHAs. Among all kinds of CAPTCHAs OCR-Based or visual CAPTCHAs are very common. Actually visual CAPTCHA is an image containing a sequence of characters. So far most of visual CAPTCHAs, in order to resist against OCR programs...

The paper analyzes the interaction between humans and computers in terms of response time in solving the image-based CAPT-CHA. In particular, the analysis focuses on the attitude of the different Internet users in easily solving four different types of image-based CAPTCHAs which include facial expressions like: animated character, old woman, surprised face, worried face. To pursue this goal, an...

For the last ten years, CAPTCHAs have been widely used by websites to prevent their data being automatically updated by machines. By supposedly allowing only humans to do so, CAPTCHAs take advantage of the reverse Turing test (TT), knowing that humans are more intelligent than machines. Generally, CAPTCHAs have defeated machines, but things are changing rapidly as technology improves. Hence, ad...

Optical character recognition (OCR) is one of the fundamental problems in artificial intelligence and image processing, but recent progress in OCR represents a security challenge for Web sites that throttle requests with image based CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). A CAPTCHA is challengeresponse test placed within web forms to determine whe...