Breaking e-banking CAPTCHAs

  • Authors:
  • Shujun Li;S. Amier Haider Shah;M. Asad Usman Khan;Syed Ali Khayam;Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi;Roland Schmitz

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Konstanz, Germany;National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan;National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan;National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan;Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany;Stuttgart Media University, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 26th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Many financial institutions have deployed CAPTCHAs to protect their services (e.g., e-banking) from automated attacks. In addition to CAPTCHAs for login, CAPTCHAs are also used to prevent malicious manipulation of e-banking transactions by automated Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attackers. Despite serious financial risks, security of e-banking CAPTCHAs is largely unexplored. In this paper, we report the first comprehensive study on e-banking CAPTCHAs deployed around the world. A new set of image processing and pattern recognition techniques is proposed to break all e-banking CAPTCHA schemes that we found over the Internet, including three e-banking CAPTCHA schemes for transaction verification and 41 schemes for login. These broken e-banking CAPTCHA schemes are used by thousands of financial institutions worldwide, which are serving hundreds of millions of e-banking customers. The success rate of our proposed attacks are either equal to or close to 100%. We also discuss possible improvements to these e-banking CAPTCHA schemes and show essential difficulties of designing e-banking CAPTCHAs that are both secure and usable.