CAPTCHAs (completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart) have been the main protection against malicious attacks on public systems for many years. Audio CAPTCHAs, as one of the most important CAPTCHA forms, provide an effective test for visually impaired users. However, in recent years, most of the existing audio CAPTCHAs have been successfully attacked by machine learning-based audio recognition algorithms, showing their insecurity. In this article, a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based method is proposed to generate adversarial audio CAPTCHAs. This method is implemented by using a generator to synthesize noise, a discriminator to make it similar to the target and a threshold function to limit the size of the perturbation; then, the synthetic perturbation is combined with the original audio to generate the adversarial audio CAPTCHA. The experimental results demonstrate that the addition of adversarial examples can greatly reduce the recognition accuracy of automatic models and improve the robustness of different types of audio CAPTCHAs. We also explore ensemble learning strategies to improve the transferability of the proposed adversarial audio CAPTCHA methods. To investigate the effect of adversarial CAPTCHAs on human users, a user study is also conducted.

Captcha, which can prevent computer programs from attacking websites, has been the most important security technology for many years. The most popularly deployed Captcha is the text-based scheme. The vast majority of the existing text Captchas are designed with English letters and Arabic numerals. Recently, text Captchas with large character sets are being increasingly popular. From the perspective of attackers, larger character set means greater solution space and better theoretical security. However, the security of Captchas with large character sets in real world has never been studied comprehensively. In this article, we introduce a simple, fast, and effective deep learning method to attack these newly emerging Captchas. Taking 11 Chinese Captchas as representatives, we ran our experimental attack on each of them. Our attack achieved high success rates, ranging from 34.7 to 86.9 percent at an average speed of 0.175 seconds on these schemes. All of the results show that the Chinese text Captcha can be easily broken, demonstrating that text Captchas with large character sets are also insecure in existing forms. As a substitute, we proposed a 3D image-based scheme combining semantic comprehension and dragging action. The preliminary experimental results show that it is more robust than current text-based schemes.