ScatterType: A Legible but Hard-to-Segment CAPTCHA

  • Authors:
  • Henry S. Baird;Michael A. Moll;Sui-Yu Wang

  • Affiliations:
  • Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA;Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA;Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA

  • Venue:
  • ICDAR '05 Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

The ScatterType CAPTCHA, designed to resist character- segmentation attacks and shown to be highly legible to human readers, is analyzed for vulnerabilities and is offered for experiments in automatic attack. As introduced in [BR05], 'ScatterType' challenges are images of machine-print text whose characters are cut into pieces which then drift apart, in an attempt to frustrate segment-then-recognize computer vision attacks. Analysis of experimental human legibility data has shown that better than 95% correct legibility can be achieved through judicious choice of the pseudorandom generating parameters [BMW05]. That analysis is summarized and discussed here as motivation for a discussion of potential vulnerabilities. An invitation to attack ScatterType is offered.