What is CAPTCHA and How it Works ?



CAPTCHA which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is a type of challenge-response test to ensure that the response is only generated by humans and not by a computer.

In simple words, CAPTCHA is the word verification test that you will come across the end of a sign-up form while signing up for Gmail or Yahoo account.


Almost every Internet user will have an experience of CAPTCHA in their daily Internet usage, but only a few are aware of what it is and why they are used. So, in this post you will find a detailed information on how CAPTCHA works and why it is used.

 

What Purpose does CAPTCHA Exactly Serve?

CAPTCHA is mainly used to prevent automated software (bots) from performing actions on behalf of actual humans.

For example, while signing up for a new email account, you will come across a CAPTCHA at the end of the sign-up form so as to ensure that the form is filled out only by a legitimate human and not by any of the automated software or a computer bot. The main goal of CAPTCHA is to put forth a test which is simple and straight forward for any human to answer but for a computer, it is almost impossible to solve.

 

What is the Need to Create a Test that Can Tell Computers and Humans Apart?

For many, the CAPTCHA may seem to be silly and annoying! It's because of people trying to game the system -- they want to exploit weaknesses in the computers running the site. While these individuals probably make up a minority of all the people on the Internet, their actions can affect millions of users and Web sites. For example, a free e-mail service might find itself bombarded by account requests from an automated program. That automated program could be part of a larger attempt to send out spam mail to millions of people. The CAPTCHA test helps identify which users are real human beings and which ones are computer programs.

 

Who Uses CAPTCHA?

CAPTCHAs are mainly used by websites that offer services like online polls and registration forms.
For example, Web-based email services like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail offer free email accounts for their users. However, upon each sign-up process, CAPTCHAs are used to prevent spammers from using a bot to generate hundreds of spam mail accounts.

 

Designing a CAPTCHA System:

CAPTCHAs are designed on the fact that, the computers lack the ability that human beings have when it comes to processing visual data. It is more easily possible for humans to look at an image and pick out the patterns than a computer. This is because, computers lack the real intelligence that humans have by default. CAPTCHAs are implemented by presenting users with an image which contains distorted or randomly stretched characters which only humans should be able to identify. Sometimes, characters are stroked out or presented with a noisy background to make it even more harder for computers to figure out the patterns.

Most, but not all, CAPTCHAs rely on a visual test. Some Websites implement a totally different CAPTCHA system to tell humans and computers apart. For example, a user is presented with 4 images in which 3 contains picture of animals and one contain a flower. The user is asked to select only those images which contain animals in them. This Turing test can easily be solved by any human, but almost impossible for a computer.

 

Breaking the CAPTCHA:

The challenge in breaking the CAPTCHA lies in real hard task of teaching a computer how to process information in a way similar to how humans think. Algorithms with artificial intelligence (AI) will have to be designed in order to make the computer think like humans when it comes to recognizing the patterns in CAPTCHA images.

However, there is no universal algorithm that could pass through and break any CAPTCHA system. Thus, each CAPTCHA algorithm must have to be tackled individually. It might not work 100 percent of the time, but it can work often enough to be worthwhile to the spammers.

{Credits: www.gohacking.com}