CAPTCHA is short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. These are tests that verify whether a computing system is being operated by a human or a robot.
CAPTCHAs were built in such a way that they would need human mediation to be administered to computing systems as a part of the authentication system to ensure system security and hence prevention of unwanted looses for organizations.
Apart from summarizing how CAPTCHA works, this chapter also covers the following topics:
- Characteristics of CAPTCHAs
- Using artificial intelligence to crack CAPTCHAs
- Types of CAPTCHA
- Solving CAPTCHAs with neural networks
The following screenshot shows a CAPTCHA image that is used for verification: