Breaking Audio CAPTCHAs with Machine Learning Techniques

CAPTCHAs are computer-generated tests that humans can pass but current computer systems cannot. CAPTCHAs provide a method for automatically distinguishing a human from a computer program, and therefore can protect Web services from abuse by so-called “bots.” Most CAPTCHAs consist of distorted images, usually text, for which a user must provide some description. Unfortunately, visual CAPTCHAs limit access to the millions of visually impaired people using the Web. Audio CAPTCHAs were created to solve this accessibility issue; however, the security of audio CAPTCHAs was never formally tested. Many visual CAPTCHAs have been broken using machine learning techniques, and we propose using similar ideas to test the security of audio CAPTCHAs. Audio CAPTCHAs are generally composed of a set of words to be identified, layered on top of noise. We analyzed the security of current audio CAPTCHAs from popular Web sites by using AdaBoost, SVM, and k-NN, and achieved correct solutions for test samples with accuracy up to 71%. Such accuracy is enough to consider these CAPTCHAs broken. Training several different machine learning algorithms on different types of audio CAPTCHAs allowed us to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms so that we could create a design for a more robust audio CAPTCHA.