A Korean CAPTCHA Study: Defeating OCRs In a New CAPTCHA Context By Using Korean Syllables

Abstract

Internet is being used for several activities by a great range of users. These activities include communication, e-commerce, education, and entertainment. Users are required to register regarding website in order to enroll web activities. However, registration can be done by automated hacking software. That software make false enrollments which occupy the resources of the website by reducing the performance and efficiency of servers, even stop the entire web service. It is crucial for the websites to have a system which has the capability of differing human users and computer programs in reading images of text. Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Human Apart (CAPTCHA) is such a defense system against Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. OCR can be defined as software which work for defeating CAPTCHA images and make countless number of registrations on the websites. This study proposes a new CAPTCHA context that is Korean CAPTCHA by means of the method which is splitting CAPTCHA images into several parts with random rotation values, and drawing random lines on a grid background by using Korean characters only. Lines are in the same color with the CAPTCHA text and they provide a distortion of image with grid background. Experimental results show that Korean CAPTCHA is a more secure and effective CAPTCHA type for Korean users rather than current CAPTCHA types due to the structure of Korean letters and the algorithm we are using: rotation and splitting. In this paper, the algorithm of our method is introduced in detail.