Asirra: a CAPTCHA that exploits interest-aligned manual image categorization

We present Asirra (Figure 1), a CAPTCHA that asks users to identify cats out of a set of 12 photographs of both cats and dogs. Asirra is easy for users; user studies indicate it can be solved by humans 99.6% of the time in under 30 seconds. Barring a major advance in machine vision, we expect computers will have no better than a 1/54,000 chance of solving it. Asirra’s image database is provided by a novel, mutually beneficial partnership with Petfinder.com. In exchange for the use of their three million images, we display an “adopt me” link beneath each one, promoting Petfinder’s primary mission of finding homes for homeless animals. We describe the design of Asirra, discuss threats to its security, and report early deployment experiences. We also describe two novel algorithms for amplifying the skill gap between humans and computers that can be used on many existing CAPTCHAs.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Jeremy Elson, John R. Douceur, Jon Howell, Jared Saul
• Keywords: Asirra’s Image Database, CCS 2007, Early Deployment Experiences, Petfinder’s Primary Mission, Security Privacy