Human Cognition in Automated Truing Test Design

Abstract

Nowadays, many services in the internet including Email, search engine, social networking are provided with free of charge due to enormous growth of web users. With the expansion of Web services, denial of service (DoS) attacks by malicious automated programs (e.g., web bots) is becoming a serious problem of web service accounts. A HIP, or Human Interactive Proofs, is a human authentication mechanism that generates and grades tests to determine whether the user is a human or a malicious computer program. Unfortunately, the existing HIPs tried to maximize the difficulty for automated programs to pass tests by increasing distortion or noise. Consequently, it has also become difficult for potential users too. So there is a tradeoff between the usability and robustness in designing HIP tests. In their propose technique the authors tried to balance the readability and security by adding contextual information in the form of natural conversation without reducing the distortion and noise. In the result section, a microscopic large-scale user study was conducted involving 110 users to investigate the actual user views compare to existing state of the art CAPTCHA systems like Google's reCAPTCHA and Microsoft's CAPTCHA in terms of usability and security and found the authors' system capable of deploying largely over internet.