CAPTCHAs are a standard security mechanism used on many websites to protect online services against abuse by automated programs, or bots. The purpose of a CAPTCHA is to distinguish whether an online transaction is being carried out by a human or a bot. Unfortunately, to date many existing CAPTCHA schemes have been found to be vulnerable to automated attacks. It is widely accepted that state-of-...

In this paper the elements of the CAPTCHA usability are analyzed. CAPTCHA, as a time progressive element in computer science, has been under constant interest of ordinary, professional as well as the scientific users of the Internet. The analysis is given based on the usability elements of CAPTCHA which are abbreviated as user-centric approach to the CAPTCHA. To demonstrate it, the specific typ...

A CAPTCHA is a test that can, automatically, tell human and computer programs apart. It is a mechanism widely used nowadays for protecting web applications, interfaces, and services from malicious users and automated spammers. Usability and robustness are two fundamental aspects with CAPTCHA, where the usability aspect is the ease with which humans pass its challenges, while the robustness is t...

We argue that a set of usability heuristics are needed for easy and quick evaluation of Captchas implementations. With this set of heuristics we contribute to sustain the Captcha Mantra: “Easy for humans, hard for machines”. In particular, the usability of Captcha schemes change radically when utilized on mobile environments. We are developing a set of heuristics for use by practitioners wishin...

An automated public Turing test to distinguish between computers and humans known as CAPTCHA is a widely used technique on many websites to protect their online services from malicious users. Two fundamental aspects of captcha considered in various studies in the literature are robustness and usability. A widely accepted standard benchmark, to guide the text-based captcha developers is not yet ...

This paper studies the effect of individual differences on user performance related to text-recognition CAPTCHA challenges. In particular, a text-recognition CAPTCHA mechanism was deployed in a three-month user study to investigate the effect of individuals’ different cognitive processing abilities, targeting on speed of processing, controlled attention and working memory capacity toward effici...

CAPTCHAs have been deployed ubiquitously by web sites to combat automated malicious programs. Security against web bots and usability to legitimate users are two main goals that have to be simultaneously satisfied when designing a useful CAPTCHA scheme. However, there exists a well-known and intricate trade-off between these goals. So far, balancing this trade-off remains an art rather than a s...

As protection of web applications are getting more and more important every day, CAPTCHAs are facing booming attention both by users and designers. Nowadays, it is well accepted that using visual concepts enhance security and usability of CAPTCHAs. There exist few major different ideas for designing image CAPTCHAs. Some methods apply a set of modifications such as rotations to the original imag...

The Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) has been widely used as a technique that will allow a machine to distinguish between input from a human and that of another machine. The security of current CAPTCHA methods is not sufficient to protect against advanced modern malware. This paper focuses on applying gamification, the use of game elements in ...