Computer scientists have developed artificial intelligence that can outsmart the CAPTCHA website security check system. A CAPTCHA (an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. The technology was originally developed as an anti-spam measure by a team at Carnegie Mellon University. Researchers developed an algorithm that imitates how the human brain responds to these visual clues.
The neural network could identify letters and numbers from their shapes.
The research, conducted by Vicarious – a Californian artificial intelligence firm funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg – is published in the journal Science.
In 2013, Vicarious announced that it had cracked text-based Captcha tests used by Google, Yahoo, PayPal and Captcha.com with a 90% accuracy.
Since then, Captcha designers have made their tests more difficult to beat, but the researchers said in their new paper that the software was now able to pass Google’s reCaptcha test 66.6% of the time.
The RCN software was also able to solve reCaptacha tests from Captcha generator BotDetect at a 64.4% success rate, Yahoo Captchas at a 57.4% success rate and PayPal at a 57.1% success rate.
I feel the Two-Factor Authentication system, which is also used by our Penn State Login System, for employees, can be the best alternative for the Captcha system, since I couldn’t figure out any way of hacking this system. It might be time-consuming, as you’ll have to answer the call through your mobile or use the passcode sent to your mobile. What do you think? Is there any way of getting through this Two-Factor Authentication System?