Stanford Security Laboratory’s computer scientists have discovered how to crack audio captchas, using software that can listen in and correctly output the string of random letters and numbers websites use to test whether you’re human, or a malicious bot.
Captchas – short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” – are usually images showing a series of characters criscrossed with lines. For the visually impaired, there are audio captchas, which you listen to and have to decode. And now, Stanford researchers have built Decaptcha—a program which recognises unique sound patterns for letters and numbers. After running it through tests, they found that the program works on Digg, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo, and even reCAPTCHA, a company that creates captchas.
Decaptcha easily beat audio captchas with background noise like static or repetition, but music made its work more difficult. [PhysOrg]
ozoneocean
Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 2:20 PMI wouldn’t mind if they DEcaptchatated the people who come up with those moronic retrospective acronyms!
-”Quick,let’s think of a pithy name for our stupid service and then think of what the letters could stand for!”
Wankers. -_-
This news IS a bit worrying though! But if you can do this with sound, couldn’t you also easily get a program to do a screencap of that area of the screen and then run image recognition algorithms on the figures? They can do that with faces and photos of text you take with any Android or iphone, so with the resources of a real computer behind it I’m sure it’s not impossible.- Um, unless those phone apps actually use server resources or something for those processes…
Ben
Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 3:18 PMas for getting a screencap of the captcha – they usually have squiggly lines or highly distorted letters so a computer cant find any letters
Gabriel
Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 12:48 PMThat’s exactly why they are so hard to read. I hope in their ‘research’ they actually came up with a way to stregthen the CAPTCHA instead of just break it like a dick. Nice work guys, i look forward to more spam bots thanks to you..