ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation to everyone who

made this seminar report possible. Most of all, I would like to thank my Seminar
Supervisor, Mr. Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer
Science and Engineering, Ideal Institute of Technology Ghaziabad and Ms. Sumita
Verma, Lecturer, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Ideal Institute of
Technology Ghaziabad, for their guidance in the seminar. With their knowledge and
experience, they guided me to successfully achieve my seminar objective.
I sincerely extend my thanks to, Dr. G. P. Govil, (Prof.) and Dr. Sudhir
Dawra, (Associate Prof. & Head) Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Ideal Institute of Technology Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh for their encouragement and
support.
I express my sincere thanks to all my friends, my well-wishers and classmates
for their support and help during the seminar report.

ABHIMANYU SOOD
Roll No. 0902810002
B. Tech. (CSE)
3rd Year (A)

ABSTRACT

We introduce captcha, an automated test that humans can pass, but current
computer programs cannot pass: any program that has high success over a captcha can
be used to solve an unsolved Artificial Intelligence (AI) problem. We provide several
novel constructions of captchas. Since captchas have many applications in practical
security, our approach introduces a new class of hard problems that can be exploited for
security purposes. Much like research in cryptography has had a positive impact on
algorithms for factoring and discrete log, we hope that the use of hard AI problems for
security purposes allows us to advance the field of Artificial Intelligence. We introduce
two families of AI problems that can be used to construct captchas and we show that
solutions to such problems can be used for steganographic communication. Captchas
based on these AI problem families, then, imply a win-win situation: either the
problems remain unsolved and there is a way to differentiate humans from computers,
or the problems are solved and there is a way to communicate covertly on some
channels.

CONTENTS

Certificate
Acknowledgement -------------------------------------------------------------- i
Abstract ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ii
Content ------------------------------------------------------------------------- iii
List of Figures------------------------------------------------------------------ iv

1.

INTRODUCTION --------------------------------------------------------------------- 1
2. TYPES OF CAPTCHAS ------------------------------------------------------------- 5

3.

APPLICATION

----------------------------------------------------------------------- 12
4.

CONSTRUCTING

CAPTCHA

----------------------------------------------------- 15
5.

BREAKING

OF

CAPTCHA

-------------------------------------------------------- 24
6.

ISSUES

WITH

CAPTCHA

--------------------------------------------------------- 30

Conclusion ------------------------------------------------------------------- 33
i

Reference --------------------------------------------------------------------- 34

List of Figures

1. Fig 2.1 Gimpy CAPTCHA ------------------------------------------------------------ 6

2. Fig 2.2 Yahoos Ez Gimpy CAPTCHA ------------------------------------------- 6
3. Fig 2.3 BaffleText examples ---------------------------------------------------------- 7
4. Fig 2.4 MSN Passport CAPTCHA --------------------------------------------------- 7
5. Fig 2.5 Bongo CAPTCHA ------------------------------------------------------------ 8
6. Fig 2.6 First line shows --------------------------------------------------------------- 11
7. Fig 5.1 Breaking CAPTCHAs ------------------------------------------------------- 27
8. Fig 6.1 Usability issues in text based CAPTCHAs ------------------------------- 30