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Snapchat Account Registration CAPTCHA Defeated
hypnosec writes "Snapchat's security troubles continue as a security researcher has managed to hack its account registration CAPTCHA system with a program of less than 100 lines that took 30 minutes to develop. Steve Hickson, a computer engineer by education, wrote a small computer program with very little effort that identifies Snapchat's ghost from the given set of images. Hickson equates Snapchat's ghost very particular and calls it a template that can be matched easily using a computer program. Hickson used a combination of Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV), SURF points and FLANN matching "with a uniqueness test to determine that multiple keypoints in the training image weren't being singularly matched in the testing image.""
Wow what a deal for that company! How soon until it ends up like MySpace?
I need this code because half the time I can't figure out what the capture characters are myself.
So, what does this mean?
Disappearing spam?
A flood of dick picks?
Nothing at all?
EMFDYSI?
So is there a way you could randomly seed an algorithm to generate a ghost with some noise in its drawing to throw off the vision processing? I realize the ghost is their logo but distorting it randomly could help thwart such an attack. Or am I missing something?
Google turned on hardmode recently and now everyone's getting their solutions rejected.
One would think they would use an "AmIHotOrNot"-style CAPTCHA- show some snapped images, and ask "who would you most like to have sex with?"
i hate captchas because of my dyslexia. I don't think I have ever gotten one right first try. My suggestion is to post this software not a a hack or a breach, but sell ti as an aid to persons with disabilities who cannot handle captchas. Play your cards right, you 'll likely even get a government subsidy for it oo.
uses 3 well developed source libraries
'nuff said
...is open for more piss.
Security is always a social problem. Succeding with technical implementations is just a way of saying, "I'm not important enough for anyone to waste effort on me."
EMFDYSI?
Fix his sentence by swapping two verbs and add a preposition:
"Hickson calls Snapchat's ghost very particular and equates it to a template that can be matched easily using a computer program."
See? I'm a human, man.
As for "EMDYSI?", I thought that was a CAPTCHA for a second and was about to prove my humanity with an eight-character response.
I've been saying this for years -- here and elsewhere. Yet their foolish supporters continue to insist on using them, despite the steady parade of demonstration proofs showing that they're easily defeated. (I'm not going to bother with the catalog of links this time. Use a search engine. Read the items that show up on the first two pages of results -- that should be enough.)
Either you're defending an important resource or you're not. If you're not, then you don't need captchas and shouldn't use them. If you are, then the first person who decides that your resource is worth the trouble will break your captchas, either by code, by brute force, by co-opted masses or by some combination of those. You have no shot. NONE. If you think so, then you didn't perform the exercise I suggest in the last paragraph.)
A defense that is known-broken is not a defense at all.
...Mr. Hickson disappeared after 10 seconds.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
So is slashdot just link aggregation for hypnosec.
because they don't want anyone to see what a shitty, insecure, GPL violating, hacked together piece of shit the code is.
facebook?
you do not turn me down. --m.zuckerberg
Note also that the hypnosec didn't "write" this submission - like the vast majority of submitters s/he simply copy& pasted the first two paragraphs from the fine article. In other words, both submitter and slashdot admin either didn't read it, or have terrible reading comprehension skills. Probably both.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Hickson equates Snapchat's ghost very particular and calls it a template
Why is the summary written in Chinglish?
Oh wait, I know. It's because the submitter blindly copy-pasted it from the article and the editors don't give two shits about looking lazy and incompetent.
hypnosec writes
Can we please stop displaying this lie on practically every story? hynosec didn't write anything.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
1. Harness the power of horny teenagers by creating a free porn website that requires registration requiring a captcha, which is actually the redirected captcha of your target website.
2. Pay a room full of Indians to enter captchas all day.
You're welcome.
The desire to get access to jailbait will overcome all obstacles.
Why do "researchers" spend their time cracking captchas on commercial sites? Everyone knows they can be cracked with enough effort and time, with the goal generally being to make it too hard for the spammers to bother. Here is just seems that the researchers are doing the spammers work for them and not actually contributing anything of value.
At the end of the day this work is a net negative to society since it does not benefit the general public, does not benefit snapchat, and does not benefit snapchat's users. The only ones who benefit are the spammers.
you know, the one with like five words that repeat over and over again
There are two problems with higher-order processing CAPTCHAs like that. One is the small problem set. A human at the website has to actually think of those connections between plugs and sockets, or umbrellas and rainstorms, or pizza and ovens, or hair and shampoo, etc. So the problem space is small. Then, blindly guessing answers still yields a decent success rate. Your particular example can be guessed with a success rate of 1 in 256.
Blurring a pair of words from a dictionary onto each other automatically generates millions of possible challenges, and random guessing won't work as well- at least some image analysis is needed.
My own idea for a CAPTCHA is to use images from Google Street View. Show random street view images of a bunch of houses, and ask, "what's the house number"? That would probably take a while to crack, long enough for me to dump my startup site's shares before all the porn gets leaked- if not for those assholes at Google interfering.
From TFS: "Hickson equates Snapchat's ghost very particular and calls it a template that can be matched easily using a computer program."
I"m sorry, what????
If the captcha is easy enough for humans, 1 in 256 random chance is fine for many applications. I've designed several very successful captcha systems used on thousands of sites. There are two reasons I say 1 / 256 is often fine.
First, let's consider one typical use case - blog spam. The spammer has a choice. He can spend this evening posting to 1,000 blogs with captchas, or the same amount of time post to 256,000 blogs without captchas. Which would you choose if you were a spammer? You choose the unprotected sites, of course. Sites without captchas get hundreds of times as much spam. Bad guys are by definition lazy, so they go after the low hanging fruit. Don't be low hanging fruit.
In other use cases, there may not be direct competition. Still, there's a cost / benefit analysis. Let's say it costs 1 penny of resources to register and use a snapchat account in a way the generates 12 cents in revenue. Multiply the cost by 256 and it's no longer profitable to abuse the service.
For most of our customers, the captcha is one part of a defense against brute force on the login screen. Assume that due to the other components of the system, you need 10,000 proxies to successfully brute force the login, because IPs banned after a dozen failed attempts. The captcha multiplies that by 256, so you now need over 2.5 MILLION proxies. I suspect that nobody has 2.5 million proxies to use. We have one of the largest lists of open proxies in the world, and even we don't have quite that many.
Less than a 100 lines???
How many lines of code are in OpenCV?
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Huh? He's "a computer engineer by education"? Was this summary computer generated? No one says or writes "a computer engineer by education"!
Not a genius to be sure - at least not from this test. But it does prove he is a highly competent computer vision engineer. I would not even know which 3 libraries to use, much less been able to find, configure, link together and debug a working solution in 30 minutes.
As others have said, the point isn't that the guy is a genius or is program is ground breaking. The point is that this Captcha is futile and snapchat is dumb for relying on it.
Captcha: I can't even read the fucker, but I wanted to put that extra bit of irony in my post.
I've made a captcha in which you have to click on a "meme"
u can see it at work tryin to signup here http://esfriki.com/