Researchers Break Video CAPTCHAs

Posted by Soulskill on Monday February 20, 2012 @06:27AM from the soon-you-will-need-to-authenticate-in-person dept.

Orome1 writes "After creating the 'Decaptcha' software to solve audio CAPTCHAs, Stanford University's researchers modified it and turned it against text and, quite recently, video CAPTCHAs with considerable success. Video CAPTCHAs have been touted by their developer, NuCaptcha, as the best and most secure method of spotting bots trying to pass themselves off as human users. Unfortunately for the company, researchers have managed to prove that over 90 percent of the company's video CAPTCHAs can be decoded by using their Decaptcha software in conjunction with optical flow algorithms created by researchers in the computer vision field of study."

1 of 109 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Charge CPU Time instead by epdp14 · 2012-02-20 07:20 · Score: 3, Interesting

What about charging 10-15 seconds of CPU time with some arbitrarily hard code? It seems like everyone agrees that CAPTCHAs are an arms race that the good guys can't win, why not make it where it isn't profitable to solve the CAPTCHA replacement on a large scale?