Constructing Secure Audio CAPTCHAs by Exploiting Differences between Humans and Machines

To prevent abuses of Internet services, CAPTCHAs are used to distinguish humans from programs where an audio-based scheme is beneficial to support visually impaired people. Previous studies show that most audio CAPTCHAs, albeit hard to solve for humans, are lacking security strength. In this work we propose an audio CAPTCHA that is far more robust against automated attacks than it is reported for current CAPTCHA schemes. The CAPTCHA exhibits a good trade-off between human usability and security. This is achieved by exploiting the fact that the human capabilities of language understanding and speech recognition are clearly superior compared to current machines. We evaluate the CAPTCHA security by using a state-of-the-art attack and assess the intelligibility by means of a large-scale listening experiment.