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I Am Not a Robot: an Overview on Google's Captcha

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I Am Not a Robot: an Overview on Google's Captcha I AM NOT A ROBOT: - AN OVERVIEW ON GOOGLE’S CAPTCHA A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science In Computer Science By Uday Prabhala 2016 SIGNATURE PAGE THESIS: I AM NOT A ROBOT: - AN OVERVIEW ON GOOGLE’S CAPTCHA AUTHOR: Uday Prabhala DATE SUBMITTED: Summer 2016 Computer Science Department. Dr. Gilbert Young ___________________________________________ Thesis Committee Chair Computer Science Dr. Fang D. Tang ___________________________________________ Computer Science Dr. Yu Sun ___________________________________________ Computer Science ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my family members, Yashoda, Lucky, and Diskey, as well as my girlfriend Siri, who helped make this endeavor possible. Their limitless support, assistance, and encouragement during the times when I was close to giving up were greatly helpful, and I wouldn’t have been able to overcome the obstacles without them. I would also like to send my appreciation and gratitude to the Professors who were part of my thesis committee. Most notably, I would like to thank Professor Gilbert Young, chair of the committee, for his support, patience, guidance, and sharing of knowledge throughout the program. I would also like to thank Professor Tang and Professor Yusun for reviewing my paper and attending my presentation. The above three Professors not only helped me to complete my program, but also served as an excellent example by exercising professionalism, versatility, and commitment to the developing engineering students at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. iii ABSTRACT I am not a Robot Overview on Google’s Captcha Uday Kiran Prabhala Computers are one of the greatest inventions done by humans; these devices not only made our work easy, but could also be misused in various ways. One of such way is "being human". Captcha’s are a way to prevent these, having said that, Captcha’s can be compromised by many attacks. To make Captcha’s stronger to attacks different techniques have been implemented. These Captcha’s run the gamut from the old plain Captcha’s to the newest Nu-Captcha [1]; however attackers are finding different ways to break these Captcha’s [2]. On a tangential note, there are human resolvers solving the Captcha’s by using automated tools [3] for reasonable prices. I am not a Robot is the new secure Captcha designed by Google. Is it really secure? How to protect it from human resolvers? iv TABLE OF CONTENTS SIGNATURE PAGE ......................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................ vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................1 2. LITERATURE SURVEY ..........................................................................................2 2.1. Early Development ..........................................................................................2 2.2. Areas for Captcha .............................................................................................2 2.3. Captcha Attacks ..............................................................................................5 2.4. Types of Captcha .............................................................................................6 2.5. Past Research ................................................................................................12 2.6. Research Goal ...............................................................................................14 2.7. Methodology .................................................................................................14 2.8. Research Findings .........................................................................................14 3. I AM NOT A ROBOT ............................................................................................16 3.1. Overview .......................................................................................................16 3.1.1. Mouse Readings .................................................................................17 3.1.2. Cookie Method ..................................................................................17 3.2. Breaking Google’s Captcha ...........................................................................19 v 3.3. Integrating I am not a robot to Website ..........................................................20 3.4. Limitations .....................................................................................................23 3.5. Mouse patterns ..............................................................................................23 4. HUMAN RESOLVERS ..........................................................................................26 4.1. How they work ...............................................................................................26 4.2. Limitations ....................................................................................................31 4.3. Observations .................................................................................................31 4.3.1. Mouse Coordinates and clicks ............................................................31 4.4. Puzzle Architecture ........................................................................................33 4.5. Proposed Solution ..........................................................................................34 4.5.1. Submittals ...........................................................................................35 4.5.2. Time Frame ........................................................................................35 4.6. Explanation ....................................................................................................35 5. EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS .........................................................................37 5.1. Experiment .....................................................................................................37 5.2. Results ............................................................................................................39 6. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK ...............................................................43 6.1. Conclusion .....................................................................................................48 6.2. Future work ....................................................................................................48 REFERENCES .....................................................................................................50 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Websites where Captcha not installed ........................................................ 4 Figure 2 Websites where Captcha installed .............................................................. 4 Figure 3 Gimpy Captcha’s ........................................................................................ 8 Figure 4 Face Recognition Captcha .......................................................................... 9 Figure 5 Optical Illusion Captcha ............................................................................. 10 Figure 6 Captcha Games, Click ................................................................................. 11 Figure 7 Captcha Games, Drag ................................................................................. 11 Figure 8 I Am Not A Robot Captcha ....................................................................... 13 Figure 9 I am Not a Robot Captcha 2 ........................................................................ 16 Figure 10 Registering Domains .................................................................................. 20 Figure 11 Site Key ....................................................................................................... 21 Figure 12 Snippets ....................................................................................................... 21 Figure 13 Location ...................................................................................................... 21 Figure 14 Login Page .................................................................................................. 22 Figure 15 Generated Key ............................................................................................ 22 vii Figure 16 API Client ................................................................................................... 27 Figure 17 Storefront Image ......................................................................................... 30 Figure 18 Confusing Captchas .................................................................................... 30 Figure 19 Mouse Coordinates ..................................................................................... 33 Figure 20 Dog Rotation Puzzle ................................................................................... 34 Figure 21 Question 1 ................................................................................................... 37 Figure 22 Question 2 ..................................................................................................
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