Security and usability challenges of moving-object CAPTCHAs: decoding codewords in motion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We explore the robustness and usability of movingimage object recognition (video) captchas, designing and implementing automated attacks based on computer vision techniques. Our approach is suitable for broad classes of moving-image captchas involving rigid objects. We first present an attack that defeats instances of such a captcha (NuCaptcha) representing the state-ofthe-art, involving dynamic text strings called codewords. We then consider design modifications to mitigate the attacks (e.g., overlapping characters more closely). We implement the modified captchas and test if designs modified for greater robustness maintain usability. Our labbased studies show that the modified captchas fail to offer viable usability, even when the captcha strength is reduced below acceptable targets—signaling that the modified designs are not viable. We also implement and test another variant of moving text strings using the known emerging images idea. This variant is resilient to our attacks and also offers similar usability to commercially available approaches. We explain why fundamental elements of the emerging images concept resist our current attack where others fails. 1
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".