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posted by CoolHand on Friday December 07 2018, @02:09PM   Printer-friendly

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Talk about a GAN-do attitude... AI software bots can see through your text CAPTCHAs

[...] Boffins at Lancaster University in the UK, Northwest University in the US, and Peking University in China have devised an approach for creating text-based CAPTCHA solvers that makes it trivial to automatically decipher scrambled depictions of text.

Researchers Guixin Ye, Zhanyong Tang, Dingyi Fang, Zhanxing Zhu, Yansong Feng, Pengfei Xu, Xiaojiang Chen, and Zheng Wang describe their CAPTCHA cracking system in a paper that was presented at the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in October and now released to the public.

As can be surmised from the title, "Yet Another Text Captcha Solver: A Generative Adversarial Network Based Approach," the computer scientists used a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) to teach their CAPTCHA generator, which is used for training their text recognition model.

First described in 2014, a GAN consists of two neural network models pitted against each other as adversaries, one simulating something and the other spotting problems with the simulation until any differences can not longer be identified.

Coincidentally, that's the same year researchers from Google and Stanford published a paper titled, "The End is Nigh: Generic Solving of Text-based CAPTCHAs." Four years on, the speed bumps limiting generic attacks have been paved over.

A GAN turns out to be well-suited for efficiently training data models. It allowed the researchers to teach their CAPTCHA generation program to quickly create lots of synthetic text puzzles to train their basic puzzle solving model. They then fine-tuned it via transfer learning to defeat real text jumbles using only a small set (~500 instead of millions) of actual samples.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday December 07 2018, @03:15PM (4 children)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Friday December 07 2018, @03:15PM (#771162) Journal

    ReCAPTCHA doesn't, anyway. But I guess Pepperidge Farm remembers.....

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Friday December 07 2018, @08:59PM (3 children)

    by edIII (791) on Friday December 07 2018, @08:59PM (#771304)

    I dunno, but who the fuck can pass one these days? I've sat there for over a minute clicking fucking tile after tile after tile. I've outright failed to get through some captcha systems. Meanwhile the bots keep evolving with AI, and can solve the captchas faster than any human can.

    At some point proving your human is going to mean including random failures in specific ways, or fucking up in a way only a human can do :)

    Server: Are you human?
    Bot: Ummm? Derpity Derp Derp! Fuck U. I need to login fuk. #bullshit #derp
    Server: You may pass

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    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @10:52PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @10:52PM (#771327)

      Using you as a mechanical turk.

      Also likely using it to help them identify your mouse/click profile for future identification on other sites. I've been having to take a few minutes each time on those captchas making my mouse movements and clicks look fake, and having both clicked wrong tiles and clicked exactly the correct tiles each time, they always take a minimum of 3 and up to 10 windows worth of times before accepting you as human and letting you in.

      It is free labor, not you fucking up as a human that is making the google captcha experience so bad. Do what I do and unless you HAVE TO use a site, just say No! to google.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Saturday December 08 2018, @01:27AM (1 child)

        by edIII (791) on Saturday December 08 2018, @01:27AM (#771380)

        Ohhh, I've gone much, much, much, farther than that. There have been some big name vendor sites that started using Google's recaptcha at every single login. I totally lost my shit one day during a service outage when the captcha system was preventing me from accessing the administrative functions I desperately needed. Called up technical support and I made them make the changes for me. Not initially, but after two levels of supervisors they did.

        After that, their CTO was surprised that I got all the way to him, and I read him the fucking riot act. I demanded as a consequence of my obvious stupidity, and received, an IP white listing from a few management networks that prevented the captcha from ever appearing again. We agreed too, that the website itself was a fallback measure, and I should encode all the adminstrative functions into my platform via an API. I agreed, but it is still some work needing to be done to fully integrate it.

        All because a fucking captcha system is too damn complicated for a human to get past. Fuck if know why I kept failing. I clicked all the goddamn fucking boxes with a car in it, or a sign it, or a storefront it. If they were going to torture my ass, the least they could do is create a pornographic one. Pick all the DPs in the following picture....

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @09:15PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @09:15PM (#771662)

          "Fuck if know why I kept failing."

          Uh oh, won't be long before the bots suspect they might not be human. This one is just 3rd gen, I'm betting the sixes are already aware.