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Talk About a GAN-do Attitude... AI Software Bots Can See Through Your Text CAPTCHAs

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

upstart writes:

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @11:47PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 07 2018, @11:47PM (#771345)

    So says the AC from the land of hamburgers, hotdogs and twinkies.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @07:06PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @07:06PM (#771627)

    hamburger

    UK: Patty on a bap. Very common food there. Hamburgers, like most sandwich stacks, can range from pretty boring to utterly sublime. At least here in the US. Sorry your taste buds were torn off in the football* stadium riots.

    hotdogs

    UK: Sausage. Very common food there. Yours just aren't as good as ours. A shame.

    twinkies

    Twinkies are available in the UK and Ireland under the Hostess brand name where they're sold in Sainsburys, Tesco, ASDA and B&M stores. Very common snack food there. Although frankly, Twinkies were a lot better when they were fresh-baked products not infused with so many preservatives.

    So...

    Yeah. You got nothing. See, I've lived in both places, and American food is way better. :)

    So head on back out to the pub, suck down some warm, cloudy beer, and enjoy your choice of haggis, stargazy pie, black pudding, and offal. Perhaps a side of some drippings on toast. Throw some liquor** on the latter for extra... flavo(u)r.

    Notes for US readers:

    * "football" is what they call soccer in the UK
    ** "liquor" in the UK is a (horrible-tasting) sauce made with parsley and vinegar. Seriously.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @07:54PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @07:54PM (#771635)

      UK reader here.

      "football" is what they call soccer in the UK

      Yes, because we invented it, and because it involves moving a ball with your foot ... unlike the so-called American football, in which the ball is very rarely kicked but handled most of the time.

      "liquor" in the UK is a (horrible-tasting) sauce made with parsley and vinegar. Seriously.

      Never heard of it. Liquor = alcoholic spirit, as in the US, but it's rarely used. Instead of liquor stores, we have off-licences, the meaning of which should be self-evident. ;-)

      Twinkies are available in the UK and Ireland under the Hostess brand name where they're sold in Sainsburys, Tesco, ASDA and B&M stores. Very common snack food there.

      Again, never heard of them. I don't deny they may exist, but I've never seen them or consumed one.

      suck down some warm, cloudy beer

      It's not warm, it's served at room temperature. And if it's cloudy, you send it back; it should be clear.

      I can't be bothered to comment on the rest, but it's mostly rubbish (=garbage, trash, crap).

      AC