An audio CAPTCHA to distinguish humans from computers

Haichang, Gao; Liu, Honggang; Yao, Dan; Liu, Xiyang; Aickelin, Uwe

Abstract

CAPTCHAs are employed as a security measure to differentiate human users from bots. A new sound-based
CAPTCHA is proposed in this paper, which exploits the gaps
between human voice and synthetic voice rather than relays on the auditory perception of human. The user is required to read out a given sentence, which is selected randomly from a specified book. The generated audio file will be analyzed automatically to judge whether the user is a human or not. In this paper, the design of the new CAPTCHA, the analysis of the audio files, and the choice of the audio frame window function are described in detail. And also, some experiments are conducted to fix the critical threshold and the coefficients of three indicators to ensure the security. The proposed audio CAPTCHA is proved accessible to users. The user study has shown that the human success rate reaches approximately 97% and the pass rate of attack software using Microsoft SDK 5.1 is only 4%. The experiments also indicated that it could be solved
by most human users in less than 14 seconds and the average
time is only 7.8 seconds.

Citation

Haichang, G., Liu, H., Yao, D., Liu, X., & Aickelin, U. (2010). An audio CAPTCHA to distinguish humans from computers. In F. Yu, M. Russell, N. Rubens, & J. Zhang (Eds.), Third International Symposium on Electronic Commerce and Security, ISECS2010: Guangzhou, China, 29-31 July 2010. IEEE Computer Society

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2010
• Deposit Date: Aug 23, 2010
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 23, 2010
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: Third International Symposium on Electronic Commerce and Security, ISECS2010: Guangzhou, China, 29-31 July 2010
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1012688
• Publisher URL: http://isecs2010.gdcc.edu.cn/index.htm
• Related Public URLs: http://isecs2010.gdcc.edu.cn/4219z003.pdf; http://www.ieee.org/index.html