Text-based CAPTCHAs are the most widely used CAPTCHA scheme. Most text-based CAPTCHAs have been cracked. However, previous works have mostly relied on a series of preprocessing steps to attack text CAPTCHAs, which was complicated and inefficient. In this paper, we introduce a simple, generic, and effective end-to-end attack on text CAPTCHAs without any preprocessing. Through a convolutional neural network and an attention-based recurrent neural network, our attack broke a wide range of real-world text CAPTCHAs that are deployed by the top 50 most popular websites ranked by Alexa.com. In addition, this paper comprehensively analyzed the security of most resistance mechanisms of text-based CAPTCHAs through experiments. Experimental results prove that the anti-segmentation principle can be completely broken under deep learning attacks without any segmentation or preprocessing steps in contrast to commonly held beliefs.

Over the last few years, completely automated public turing test to tell computers and humans apart (CAPTCHA) has been used as an effective method to prevent websites from malicious attacks, however, CAPTCHA designers failed to reach a balance between good usability and high security. In this study, the authors apply neural style transfer to enhance the security for CAPTCHA design. Two image‐based CAPTCHAs, Grid‐CAPTCHA and Font‐CAPTCHA, based on neural style transfer are proposed. Grid‐CAPTCHA offers nine stylized images to users and requires users to select all corresponding images according to a short description, and Font‐CAPTCHA asks users to click Chinese characters presented in the image in sequence according to the description. To evaluate the effectiveness of this techniques on enhancing CAPTCHA security, they conducted a comprehensive field study and compared them to similar mechanisms. The comparison results demonstrated that the neural style transfer decreased the success rate of automated attacks. Human beings have achieved a successful solving rate of 75.04 and 84.49% on the Grid‐CAPTCHA and Font‐CAPTCHA schemes, respectively, indicating good usability. The results prove deep learning can have a positive effect on enhancing CAPTCHA security and provides a promising direction for future CAPTCHA study.