Nirwan Ansari, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, along with two of his former students developed the next generation CAPTCHA that requires users to identify text presented in video animation.

CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".

Like Us on Facebook

Conceived by famous British computer scientist and cryptanalyst Alan Turing, Captcha is a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether the user is human or not.

"Current static CAPTCHAs can be easily breached now and so the idea was to make the test more robust. Machines do not have our eyes -- our complex visual intelligence -- and we exploit that advantage," said Ansari.

Their new technology, which was recently patented under the name "Simultaneous Contrast and the Persistence of Vision CAPTCHA", depends on the human capability to quickly process moving images.

"In our video-based CAPTCHA, if you capture one frame, it tells you nothing. If you combine the frames, together they still tell you nothing. We're relying on a unique human ability to connect images." Ansari continued.

"We display them against a contrasting color to make them even more difficult for bots to interpret. So it is easy for humans to pass the test by simply identifying the text of the short video, but difficult for machines to extract meaning from it."

"In order to defeat sophisticated attackers who keep improvising their breaking techniques, CAPTCHAs are becoming tougher for humans to solve. We keep our text simple and thus easy to recognize," Ansari added.

TagsCAPTCHA, Alan Turing, Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, internet security, technology