LineCAPTCHA Mobile: A User Friendly Replacement for Unfriendly Reverse Turing Tests for Mobile Devices (ICIAfS14)

TL;DR

This paper introduces LineCAPTCHA, a user-friendly mobile CAPTCHA based on drawing Bezier curves, designed to improve security and usability on smartphones and tablets amidst evolving AI and cryptography challenges.

Contribution

The paper presents the implementation and evaluation of a novel mobile CAPTCHA, LineCAPTCHA, which is based on drawing Bezier curves and emphasizes security and user-friendliness.

Findings

LineCAPTCHA is effective on mobile devices.

It maintains high usability across different user groups.

Security standards are successfully integrated into the design.

Abstract

As smart phones and tablets are becoming ubiquitous and taking over as the primary choice for accessing the Internet worldwide, ensuring a secure gateway to the servers serving such devices become essential. CAPTCHAs play an important role in identifying human users in internet to prevent unauthorized bot attacks. Even though there are numerous CAPTCHA alternatives available today, there are certain drawbacks attached with each alternative, making them harder to find a general solution for the necessity of a CAPTCHA mechanism. With the advancing technology and expertise in areas such as AI, cryptography and image processing, it has come to a stage where the chase between making and breaking CAPTCHAs are even now. This has led the humans with a hard time deciphering the CAPTCHA mechanisms. In this paper, we adapt a novel CAPTCHA mechanism named as LineCAPTCHA to mobile devices. LineCAPTCHA is a new reverse Turing test based on drawing on top of Bezier curves within noisy backgrounds. The major objective of this paper is to report the implementation and evaluation of LineCAPTCHA on a mobile platform. At the same time we impose certain security standards and security aspects for establishing LineCAPTCHAs which are obtained through extensive measures. Independency from factors such as the fluency in English language, age and easily understandable nature of it inclines the usability of LineCAPTCHA. We believe that such independency will favour the main target of LineCAPTCHA, user friendliness and usability.