I Am 'Totally' Human: Bypassing the reCaptcha

Abstract

In recent years, website administrators have searched for a tool to prevent automated “bots” from using their sites' resources, hindering legitimate user access. By offering a “challenge” in the form of analyzing a picture for certain features, matching like symbols from a selection, or listening to an audio clip and transcribing the text, these tasks are intended to be easy for humans to solve but impossible for a program to overcome. More recently, there have been many successful attempts at using modern technology to automate passing these challenges. In this paper, we propose a simple approach which makes use of open-source tools (reCaptcha Widget, Selenium – a proxy server pool and a public Speech to Text API) to circumvent the reCaptcha tool utilized by Google. Preliminary results demonstrate an approximately 35% success rate which can be easily improved with minor modification. However, the focal point is the simplicity of the proposed approach to highlight the vulnerability of Google's reCaptcha tool against Speech to Text API attack.