Technology Review: The CAPTCHA Arms Race

Description

The CAPTCHA Arms Race

Researchers mull the next step in spam deterrents.

Spammers use automated programs called bots to harvest online data, so in 2000, a group of researchers created a bot deterrent called the Captcha--the "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart." The first Captchas required people to type in words displayed as images on a Web page in order to access a website.

But as bots have gotten smarter and Captchas more complicated, two problems have arisen. The first is that the Captchas can be hard for humans to solve, too. The second is that spammers have simply enlisted networks of humans to attack Captchas.

Researchers are tackling both problems. For instance, Jon Bentley of Avaya Labs and Henry Baird, a professor at Lehigh University, have proposed "implicit Captchas" that would present a number of small tests as part of the natural experience of browsing a website. To move from one page to the next, the user might have to click a particular object in an image. Though relatively simple, the tests would be numerous enough to establish that it's probably a human at the keyboard. But navigating a site would require ...

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