Complex Image Recognition and Web Security

Web services offered for human use are being abused by programs. Efforts to defend against these abuses have, over the last 5 years, stimulated the development of a new family of security protocols able to distinguish between human and machine users automatically over graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and networks. AltaVista pioneered this technology in 1997; by 2000, Yahoo! and PayPal were using similar methods. Researchers at Carnegie- Mellon University [2] and then a collaboration between the University of California at Berkeley and the Palo Alto Research Center [9] developed such tests. By January 2002 the subject was called human interactive proofs (HIPs), defined broadly as challenge/response protocols that allow a human to authenticate herself as a member of a given group: e.g., human (vs. machine), herself (vs. anyone else), etc. All commercial uses of HIPs exploit the gap in reading ability between humans and machines. Thus, many technical issues studied by the image recognition research community are relevant to HIPs. This chapter describes the evolution of HIP R&D, applications of HIPs now and on the horizon, relevant legal issues, highlights of the first two HIP workshops, and proposals for an image recognition research agenda to advance the state of the art of HIPs.

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