Abstract
Text based CAPTCHAs are the de facto method of choice to ensure that humans (rather than automated bots) are interacting with websites. Unfortunately, users often find it inconvenient to read characters and type them in. Image CAPTCHAs provide an alternative that is often preferred to text-based implementations. However, Image CAPTCHAs have their own set of security and usability problems. A key issue is their susceptibility to Reverse Image Search (RIS) and Computer Vision (CV) attacks. In this paper, we present a generalized methodology to transform existing images by applying various noise generation algorithms into variants that are resilient to such attacks. To evaluate the usability/security tradeoff, we conduct a user study to determine if the method can provide “usable” images that meet our security requirements – thus improving the overall security provided by Image CAPTCHAs.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Blocki, J., Blum, M., Datta, A.: Gotcha password hackers!. In: AISec 2013, pp. 25–34 (2013)
Chew, M., Tygar, J.D.: Image recognition captchas. In: Zhang, K., Zheng, Y. (eds.) ISC 2004. LNCS, vol. 3225, pp. 268–279. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Datta, R., Joshi, D., Li, J., Wang, J.Z.: Image Retrieval: Ideas, Influences, and Trends of the New Age. ACM Comput. Surv. 40(2), 5:1–5:60 (2008)
Datta, R., Li, J., Wang, J.Z.: Imagination: a robust image-based captcha generation system. In: MULTIMEDIA 2005, pp. 331–334 (2005)
El Ahmad, A.S., Yan, J., Marshall, L.: The robustness of a new captcha. In: EUROSEC 2010, pp. 36–41 (2010)
Fritsch, C., Netter, M., Reisser, A., Pernul, G.: Attacking image recognition captchas. In: Katsikas, S., Lopez, J., Soriano, M. (eds.) TrustBus 2010. LNCS, vol. 6264, pp. 13–25. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Gossweiler, R., Kamvar, M., Baluja, S.: What’s up captcha?: a captcha based on image orientation. In: WWW 2009, pp. 841–850 (2009)
Hernandez-Castro, C.J., Ribagorda, A., Saez, Y.: Side-channel attack on the humanauth captcha. In: SECRYPT 2010, pp. 1–7 (2010)
Jian, M.-F., Chu, H.-K., Lee, R.-R., Ku, C.-L., Wang, Y.-S., Yao, C.-Y.: Emerging images synthesis from photographs. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2013, pp. 97:1–97:1 (2013)
Lorenzi, D., Vaidya, J., Sural, S., Atluri, V.: Web services based attacks against image captchas. In: Bagchi, A., Ray, I. (eds.) ICISS 2013. LNCS, vol. 8303, pp. 214–229. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Lorenzi, D., Vaidya, J., Uzun, E., Sural, S., Atluri, V.: Attacking image based captchas using image recognition techniques. In: Venkatakrishnan, V., Goswami, D. (eds.) ICISS 2012. LNCS, vol. 7671, pp. 327–342. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Lowe, D.G.: Object recognition from local scale-invariant features. In: ICCV 1999, pp. 1150–1157 (1999)
Matthews, P., Mantel, A., Zou, C.C.: Scene tagging: image-based captcha using image composition and object relationships. In: ASIACCS 2010, pp. 345–350 (2010)
Mehrnejad, M., Bafghi, A., Harati, A., Toreini, E.: Multiple seimcha: multiple semantic image captcha. In: ICITST 2011, pp. 196–201 (2011)
Mitra, N.J., Chu, H.-K., Lee, T.-Y., Wolf, L., Yeshurun, H., Cohen-Or, D.: Emerging images. In: ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, pp. 163:1–163:8 (2009)
Morel, J.-M., Yu, G.: Asift: A New Framework for Fully Affine Invariant Image Comparison. SIAM J. Img. Sci. 2(2), 438–469 (2009)
von Ahn, L., Blum, M., Langford, J.: Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically. Commun. ACM 47(2), 56–60 (2004)
Yan, J., El Ahmad, A.S.: Usability of captchas or usability issues in captcha design. In: SOUPS 2008, pp. 44–52 (2008)
Zhu, B.B., Yan, J., Li, Q., Yang, C., Liu, J., Xu, N., Yi, M., Cai, K.: Attacks and design of image recognition captchas. In: CCS 2010, pp. 187–200 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lorenzi, D., Uzun, E., Vaidya, J., Sural, S., Atluri, V. (2015). Enhancing the Security of Image CAPTCHAs Through Noise Addition. In: Federrath, H., Gollmann, D. (eds) ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection. SEC 2015. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 455. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18467-8_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18467-8_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-18466-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-18467-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)