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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2307.12108 (cs)
[Submitted on 22 Jul 2023]

Title:An Empirical Study & Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs

Authors:Andrew Searles, Yoshimichi Nakatsuka, Ercan Ozturk, Andrew
Paverd, Gene Tsudik, Ai Enkoji
Download a PDF of the paper titled An Empirical Study & Evaluation of
Modern CAPTCHAs, by Andrew Searles and 5 other authors
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    Abstract:For nearly two decades, CAPTCHAs have been widely used
    as a means of protection against bots. Throughout the years, as
    their use grew, techniques to defeat or bypass CAPTCHAs have
    continued to improve. Meanwhile, CAPTCHAs have also evolved in
    terms of sophistication and diversity, becoming increasingly
    difficult to solve for both bots (machines) and humans. Given
    this long-standing and still-ongoing arms race, it is critical to
    investigate how long it takes legitimate users to solve modern
    CAPTCHAs, and how they are perceived by those users.
    In this work, we explore CAPTCHAs in the wild by evaluating
    users' solving performance and perceptions of unmodified
    currently-deployed CAPTCHAs. We obtain this data through manual
    inspection of popular websites and user studies in which 1,400
    participants collectively solved 14,000 CAPTCHAs. Results show
    significant differences between the most popular types of
    CAPTCHAs: surprisingly, solving time and user perception are not
    always correlated. We performed a comparative study to
    investigate the effect of experimental context -- specifically
    the difference between solving CAPTCHAs directly versus solving
    them as part of a more natural task, such as account creation.
    Whilst there were several potential confounding factors, our
    results show that experimental context could have an impact on
    this task, and must be taken into account in future CAPTCHA
    studies. Finally, we investigate CAPTCHA-induced user task
    abandonment by analyzing participants who start and do not
    complete the task.

Comments: Accepted at USENIX Security 2023
Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
Cite as:  arXiv:2307.12108 [cs.CR]
          (or arXiv:2307.12108v1 [cs.CR] for this version)
          https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.12108
          Focus to learn more
          arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Yoshimichi Nakatsuka [view email]
[v1] Sat, 22 Jul 2023 15:36:13 UTC (1,815 KB)
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