[ANN] flatulent-0.0.1 ascii captcha for the masses

Brian_Candler · 3 July 2007 14:44

the flatulent gem provides brain dead simple ascii art captcha for
ruby.

Hmm, maybe I'm missing the point, but aren't these really easy for bots to
decode?

Looking at the examples at http://drawohara.tumblr.com/post/4791838
I see that random ASCII characters have been dropped around. But these can
be removed trivially, e.g.

gsub!(/[^\/|\\_()\n]/,' ')

Only minimal damage has been done to the original characters, which are now
easy to pattern-match. It therefore seems that the randomly-strewn
characters have the effect of making it more difficult for visually-impaired
users to access the site, but cause very little impedement to bots

Now, if this ASCII art were turned into a PNG I guess that would make it a
bit harder - although not much, since it's pretty trivial to OCR a clean
grid of ASCII characters back to ASCII, albeit more computationally
expensive.

Perhaps this captcha will be useful if very few sites use it, so the
spammers don't bother writing a decoder. But in that case you don't want it
used by "the masses"

Regards,

Brian.

a11 · 3 July 2007 17:07

the flatulent gem provides brain dead simple ascii art captcha for
ruby.

Hmm, maybe I'm missing the point, but aren't these really easy for bots to
decode?

Looking at the examples at http://drawohara.tumblr.com/post/4791838
I see that random ASCII characters have been dropped around. But these can
be removed trivially, e.g.

gsub!(/[^\/|\\_()\n]/,' ')

that noise was just an example - the built-in noise is now based on the characters used to draw the words so doing that would remove the word itself!

Only minimal damage has been done to the original characters, which are now
easy to pattern-match. It therefore seems that the randomly-strewn
characters have the effect of making it more difficult for visually-impaired
users to access the site, but cause very little impedement to bots

the point is that there aren't any characters! think about it - there are only random chars strewn about - not a single character from the word exists in the captcha. for instance, the Flatulent.element('foobar') produces this captcha:

<pre id='flatulent_element' style='font-weight:bold;background:#ffc;white-space:pre,nowrap;font-family:monospace;display:table;padding:11px;color:blue'>   __                      _       \</

           &

nbsp;     / _|           _</

        | |

| |_     ___      ___    | |__  |</

__ _    _ __ <||  _|

/ _ \    / _ \   | '_ \    / _| |  | '__|  | |    | (_) |  | (_) | /| |_) |  | (_|||  | |     |_|     |___/    \___|   |_._\/    \__,_|  |_|                     _</

<span 'style=color:#ccc;font-

style:oblique'>_</

           &

nbsp;                 _</

           &

nbsp;           |</

           &

nbsp;  |</

<span 'style=color:#ccc;font-

style:oblique'>| </pre>

have fun putting that together. to do it you need to render, not just parse, html! no, let's just say you drive firefox to render the html, and then clip out the image, saving it as a tiff. this is the result http://ocrnow.com gives for the above ascii captcha

l_ "l 1 l_
_ J / l_ ' / / _l
/ ó
iM=,

pretty close huh?

now, where i'm heading now, is using css and javascript so to position the image and characters within the image. this means you would actually need to first ocr the entire screen to find the captcha, then clip that out, then ocr that.

i've been working with ocr'ing several million satellite scans for the past three years and, let me tell you, it's hard even when the text is clear if the position of said text cannot be know with certainty.

and, backing up a bit, with ascii capture you are several difficult steps away from having an image - even in the simple case.

Now, if this ASCII art were turned into a PNG I guess that would make it a
bit harder - although not much, since it's pretty trivial to OCR a clean
grid of ASCII characters back to ASCII, albeit more computationally
expensive.

see above.

Perhaps this captcha will be useful if very few sites use it, so the
spammers don't bother writing a decoder. But in that case you don't want it
used by "the masses"

i'll give 100 bucks to the first person on the list to crack it when i reach 1.0

two other factors in favour of ascii art

1) there are tons of ocr programs out there available for free. there are no ascii art regognition programs that i am aware of. captcha is not suppose to be 'secure' anyhow - it's suppose to make it 'harder' for bots, that it all.

2) the porn industry and is actively moving to ascii art as we speak. this is __precisely__ because it is impossible to filter using traditional or ocr based spam filters. i think we can all agree that, when it comes to beating the system, they are the ones to follow.

-a

···

On Jul 3, 2007, at 8:44 AM, Brian Candler wrote:
--
we can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being better. simply reflect on that.
h.h. the 14th dalai lama

Brian_Candler · 4 July 2007 18:47

have fun putting that together. to do it you need to render, not
just parse, html!

It looks pretty easy to me. You'll conveniently put all the noise characters
in a different colour.

Here's my two-minute solution:

$ cat reader.rb
src = File.read("test.html")

src.gsub!(/]*#ccc[^>]*>([^<]*)<\/span>/i) { " " * $1.size }
src.gsub!(/ /, ' ')
src.gsub!(/ /i, "\n")
src.gsub!(/<\/?pre[^>]*>/, '')
puts src
$ ruby reader.rb
__ _
/ _| | |
> >_ ___ ___ |__ __ _ _ __
> _| / _ \ / _ \ | '_ \ / _ | | '__|
> > > (_) | | (_) | | |_) | | (_| | | |
>_| ___/ \___ |_._ / \__,_| |_|

Of course you can keep changing your code, and I can keep changing mine. But
someone who took more than two minutes over this could come up with a much
more robust solution (e.g. dynamically working out the contrast between
foreground and background)

Anyway, once your code is deployed on a real live site, by someone other
than you, it becomes much harder to change. And the source is going to be
available to the attacker too.

now, where i'm heading now, is using css and javascript so to
position the image and characters within the image.

Hmm - this risks making the captcha visible by fewer and fewer browsers. OK,
so lynx wouldn't be able to view a PNG captcha either; but you risk locking
out a lot of mobile devices, set-top boxes and other embedded web browsers
(which could otherwise display a PNG quite happily)

However, perhaps ASCII-art generation (as a form of unusual and disjointed
character set) combined with server-side rendering to a PNG would get around
that issue, save you a lot of work in obfuscating the HTML itself, and also
be harder to parse.

two other factors in favour of ascii art

1) there are tons of ocr programs out there available for free.
there are no ascii art regognition programs that i am aware of.

That's not because it's hard - it's because it's been totally pointless,
until now that is. If spammers start using ASCII art text, then there's an
incentive to make a reader. On the other hand, any E-mail which contains
something that looks like ASCII art could probably be classified as spam on
that basis alone.

ASCII art is, I believe, much more suited to machine reading than a scanned
printout. Most importantly, the characters will be on an exact
horizontal/vertical grid alignment, not rotated by a few degrees. And also I
suspect there will probably only be a handful of legible ASCII art character
sets to choose from.

Anyway, time will tell. If your captcha isn't widely used, then it may
remain strong enough for a reasonable time. (That's apart from the usual
attacks on captchas, such as redirecting them to other humans who are in
search of porn

Regards,

Brian.

Chad_Perrin1 · 3 July 2007 17:25

Is that supposed to be readable?

···

On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 02:07:07AM +0900, ara.t.howard wrote:

have fun putting that together. to do it you need to render, not
just parse, html! no, let's just say you drive firefox to render the
html, and then clip out the image, saving it as a tiff. this is the
result http://ocrnow.com gives for the above ascii captcha

l_ "l 1 l_
_ J / l_ ' / / _l
/ ?
iM=,

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Isaac Asimov: "Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is
completely programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest."

James_Edward_Gray_II · 3 July 2007 17:48

We will be nice and not ask how you came by this statistic, Ara.

James Edward Gray II

···

On Jul 3, 2007, at 12:07 PM, ara.t.howard wrote:

2) the porn industry and is actively moving to ascii art as we speak.

a11 · 4 July 2007 22:31

have fun putting that together. to do it you need to render, not
just parse, html!

It looks pretty easy to me. You'll conveniently put all the noise characters
in a different colour.

Here's my two-minute solution:

$ cat reader.rb
src = File.read("test.html")

src.gsub!(/]*#ccc[^>]*>([^<]*)<\/span>/i) { " " * $1.size }
src.gsub!(/ /, ' ')
src.gsub!(/ /i, "\n")
src.gsub!(/<\/?pre[^>]*>/, '')
puts src
$ ruby reader.rb
__ _
/ _| | |
> >_ ___ ___ |__ __ _ _ __
> _| / _ \ / _ \ | '_ \ / _ | | '__|
> > > (_) | | (_) | | |_) | | (_| | | |
>_| ___/ \___ |_._ / \__,_| |_|

Of course you can keep changing your code, and I can keep changing mine. But
someone who took more than two minutes over this could come up with a much
more robust solution (e.g. dynamically working out the contrast between
foreground and background)

Anyway, once your code is deployed on a real live site, by someone other
than you, it becomes much harder to change. And the source is going to be
available to the attacker too.

the latest version addresses all these issues and more. check out

http://drawohara.tumblr.com/post/4944987
http://fortytwo.merseine.nu:3000/flatulent/ajax

key points:

  - noise is image chars
  - no color diff between noise and image chars
  - image is not visible without running gecko or otherwise rendering javascript
  - image has an encoded timebomb in it: attacker has only 60s for post. this just rules out brute force attacks.

i think bumps it up into a new league of attacks - maybe not though, people are creative

now, where i'm heading now, is using css and javascript so to
position the image and characters within the image.

Hmm - this risks making the captcha visible by fewer and fewer browsers. OK,
so lynx wouldn't be able to view a PNG captcha either; but you risk locking
out a lot of mobile devices, set-top boxes and other embedded web browsers
(which could otherwise display a PNG quite happily)

However, perhaps ASCII-art generation (as a form of unusual and disjointed
character set) combined with server-side rendering to a PNG would get around
that issue, save you a lot of work in obfuscating the HTML itself, and also
be harder to parse.

true. i'm not too worried about that though.

two other factors in favour of ascii art

1) there are tons of ocr programs out there available for free.
there are no ascii art regognition programs that i am aware of.

That's not because it's hard - it's because it's been totally pointless,
until now that is. If spammers start using ASCII art text, then there's an
incentive to make a reader. On the other hand, any E-mail which contains
something that looks like ASCII art could probably be classified as spam on
that basis alone.

the problem is that acsii art can contain any chars. <- ascii art

ASCII art is, I believe, much more suited to machine reading than a scanned
printout.

i thought so too until i started playing with ocr'ing it - the results are absolutely terrible. no doubt someone could train it - but that's true of all captchas: a sufficiently trained one will win.

Most importantly, the characters will be on an exact
horizontal/vertical grid alignment, not rotated by a few degrees.

version 0.0.3 adds vertical and horziontal displacement. the next one will introduce rotation.

And also I
suspect there will probably only be a handful of legible ASCII art character
sets to choose from.

but the 'pixel' charset is large. version 0.0.3 works on that angle too.

Anyway, time will tell. If your captcha isn't widely used, then it may
remain strong enough for a reasonable time. (That's apart from the usual
attacks on captchas, such as redirecting them to other humans who are in
search of porn

right. and this is the key point: attacks can beat you with that strategy every time (not with my timebomb though - at least not as often). the only goal for a captcha is that it is not easily beaten by average coders - it's not securing something after all - it's a filter (not wall) for bots.

i'll await your next attack!

cheers.

-a

···

On Jul 4, 2007, at 12:47 PM, Brian Candler wrote:
--
we can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being better. simply reflect on that.
h.h. the 14th dalai lama

a11 · 3 July 2007 17:37

that is __exactly__ the result of ocr'ing (without training of course) the image.

attached is result file and image.

ss.txt (51 Bytes)

···

On Jul 3, 2007, at 11:25 AM, Chad Perrin wrote:

Is that supposed to be readable?

a11 · 3 July 2007 18:06

lol!

http://drawohara.tumblr.com/post/4803694

-a

···

On Jul 3, 2007, at 11:48 AM, James Edward Gray II wrote:

On Jul 3, 2007, at 12:07 PM, ara.t.howard wrote:

2) the porn industry and is actively moving to ascii art as we speak.

We will be nice and not ask how you came by this statistic, Ara.

James Edward Gray II

--
we can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being better. simply reflect on that.
h.h. the 14th dalai lama

Sammy_Larbi · 4 July 2007 23:52

ara.t.howard wrote:

- image has an encoded timebomb in it: attacker has only 60s for post. this just rules out brute force attacks.

From when does it start counting? If I've read a blog post and then try to comment, it's likely I've already used more than 60 seconds. In fact, probably most of the time I take more than 60 seconds to comment by itself.

I think a good protection scheme will take into account several factors, assign them points for failure (or passing), and once a threshold has been reached, fail the entire thing (or pass it, if you chose that route).

Sam

Chad_Perrin1 · 5 July 2007 07:31

I'd be worried about the JavaScript and CSS requirements. In fact, I
won't use a system for validating humanity that doesn't work in Lynx,
unless some other necessary functionality of the website absolutely
cannot work in Lynx (such as Flash animations). Even then, I'd probably
avoid something that won't work in Lynx, since (for example) a Lynx user
could navigate to YouTube and do a search to find a particular video,
then use youtube-dl to download it to the computer and play it using
MPlayer. No in-browser support for Flash video needed. YouTube can be a
useful website for a Lynx user -- so mine should be, too, since I don't
even provide Flash videos as the main content of any of my websites.

···

On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 07:31:43AM +0900, ara.t.howard wrote:

On Jul 4, 2007, at 12:47 PM, Brian Candler wrote:
>
>Hmm - this risks making the captcha visible by fewer and fewer
>browsers. OK,
>so lynx wouldn't be able to view a PNG captcha either; but you risk
>locking
>out a lot of mobile devices, set-top boxes and other embedded web
>browsers
>(which could otherwise display a PNG quite happily)
>
>However, perhaps ASCII-art generation (as a form of unusual and
>disjointed
>character set) combined with server-side rendering to a PNG would
>get around
>that issue, save you a lot of work in obfuscating the HTML itself,
>and also
>be harder to parse.

true. i'm not too worried about that though.

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
McCloctnick the Lucid: "The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your
time waving your hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do."

Alex_Young · 5 July 2007 09:12

ara.t.howard wrote:

- image has an encoded timebomb in it: attacker has only 60s for post. this just rules out brute force attacks.

Only naive ones... The brute force attack that still works is a birthday attack. Using that they can try attacks as fast as they can generate *new* captchas - you expect a collision every 1.2*sqrt(n) attempts, where n is the size of your keyspace. That's probably OK for "captcha per comment" sites, but it's dangerous for "captcha per account" sites.

···

--
Alex

James_Britt · 5 July 2007 00:18

you should do like blogger (blogspot) and others, allow writing and after clicking on 'submit' or 'post' or whatever to submit the form info, you then redirect to a page with the captcha and a submit. after the captcha page is sent, begin the count. 60 seconds seems a bit short for a whole post, but with a separate redirect to the captcha page, it's totally reasonable. If it takes longer, redirect again to a new captcha. After 3 or 4 failed attempts, save it in a log, kill that cookie and require a fresh start or a harder captcha.

Don't put the count in JavaScript EVER. Client side code is totally spoof-able.
All you need is the session data in the cookie to identify the user and check to see if the response came quick enough.
60 seconds might not be long enough, but a browser will time out during that long of a wait for a request's response. Still a little longer might be appropriate from an accessibility standpoint.

···

On Jul 4, 2007, at 6:52 PM, Sammy Larbi wrote:

ara.t.howard wrote:

- image has an encoded timebomb in it: attacker has only 60s for post. this just rules out brute force attacks.

From when does it start counting? If I've read a blog post and then try to comment, it's likely I've already used more than 60 seconds. In fact, probably most of the time I take more than 60 seconds to comment by itself.

I think a good protection scheme will take into account several factors, assign them points for failure (or passing), and once a threshold has been reached, fail the entire thing (or pass it, if you chose that route).

Sam

a11 · 5 July 2007 02:53

From when does it start counting?

from when the response it served. a timebomb is encoded in the form with a server-side key.

to set the key

Flatulent.key = 'hostname or something'

to set the timebomb threshold

Flatulent.ttl = 120 # seconds

If I've read a blog post and then try to comment, it's likely I've already used more than 60 seconds. In fact, probably most of the time I take more than 60 seconds to comment by itself.

I think a good protection scheme will take into account several factors, assign them points for failure (or passing), and once a threshold has been reached, fail the entire thing (or pass it, if you chose that route).

indeed, internally we also will also track ip and greylist after n attempts.

cheers.

-a

···

On Jul 4, 2007, at 5:52 PM, Sammy Larbi wrote:
--
we can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being better. simply reflect on that.
h.h. the 14th dalai lama

M_Edward_Ed_Borasky1 · 5 July 2007 14:02

Chad Perrin wrote:

···

On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 07:31:43AM +0900, ara.t.howard wrote:

On Jul 4, 2007, at 12:47 PM, Brian Candler wrote:

Hmm - this risks making the captcha visible by fewer and fewer
browsers. OK,
so lynx wouldn't be able to view a PNG captcha either; but you risk
locking
out a lot of mobile devices, set-top boxes and other embedded web
browsers
(which could otherwise display a PNG quite happily)

However, perhaps ASCII-art generation (as a form of unusual and
disjointed
character set) combined with server-side rendering to a PNG would
get around
that issue, save you a lot of work in obfuscating the HTML itself,
and also
be harder to parse.

true. i'm not too worried about that though.

I'd be worried about the JavaScript and CSS requirements. In fact, I
won't use a system for validating humanity that doesn't work in Lynx,
unless some other necessary functionality of the website absolutely
cannot work in Lynx (such as Flash animations). Even then, I'd probably
avoid something that won't work in Lynx, since (for example) a Lynx user
could navigate to YouTube and do a search to find a particular video,
then use youtube-dl to download it to the computer and play it using
MPlayer. No in-browser support for Flash video needed. YouTube can be a
useful website for a Lynx user -- so mine should be, too, since I don't
even provide Flash videos as the main content of any of my websites.

I was once a proud member of the "This Web Site Best Viewed With Lynx"
club. Ah, the good old days, when a dollar was worth a dime, Netscape
was more popular than Internet Explorer and nobody's cat had a web page.
;). I learned HTML by editing that web page by hand and generating code
with Perl 4 on an HP100 Pocket PC.

Well, maybe *somebody's* cat had a web page ...

a11 · 5 July 2007 14:49

yes. although flatulent does works without sessions, it's about three lines to save the data into the session and validate against that as well so a cautious person would be wise to do so. i'll be adding automatic session validation for rails - but the api should make it super easy anywhere.

cheers.

-a

···

On Jul 5, 2007, at 3:12 AM, Alex Young wrote:

Only naive ones... The brute force attack that still works is a birthday attack. Using that they can try attacks as fast as they can generate *new* captchas - you expect a collision every 1.2*sqrt(n) attempts, where n is the size of your keyspace. That's probably OK for "captcha per comment" sites, but it's dangerous for "captcha per account" sites.

--
we can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being better. simply reflect on that.
h.h. the 14th dalai lama

a11 · 5 July 2007 02:55

all good ideas - for now i'm just trying to get something working. fyi all the stuff is client side, however the captcha and timebomb have been blowfish encoded into hidden fields with a key known only to the server. one could make guesses, but that's about all.

cheers.

-a

···

On Jul 4, 2007, at 6:18 PM, John Joyce wrote:

you should do like blogger (blogspot) and others, allow writing and after clicking on 'submit' or 'post' or whatever to submit the form info, you then redirect to a page with the captcha and a submit. after the captcha page is sent, begin the count. 60 seconds seems a bit short for a whole post, but with a separate redirect to the captcha page, it's totally reasonable. If it takes longer, redirect again to a new captcha. After 3 or 4 failed attempts, save it in a log, kill that cookie and require a fresh start or a harder captcha.

Don't put the count in JavaScript EVER. Client side code is totally spoof-able.
All you need is the session data in the cookie to identify the user and check to see if the response came quick enough.
60 seconds might not be long enough, but a browser will time out during that long of a wait for a request's response. Still a little longer might be appropriate from an accessibility standpoint.

--
we can deny everything, except that we have the possibility of being better. simply reflect on that.
h.h. the 14th dalai lama

Chad_Perrin1 · 5 July 2007 07:34

>
you should do like blogger (blogspot) and others, allow writing and
after clicking on 'submit' or 'post' or whatever to submit the form
info, you then redirect to a page with the captcha and a submit.
after the captcha page is sent, begin the count. 60 seconds seems a
bit short for a whole post, but with a separate redirect to the
captcha page, it's totally reasonable. If it takes longer, redirect
again to a new captcha. After 3 or 4 failed attempts, save it in a
log, kill that cookie and require a fresh start or a harder captcha.

Avoid reliance on cookies. For one thing, cookies can be forged. For
another, you'll lose a lot of people with requirements for cookies.
Modern browsers tend to provide a means for selectively refusing cookies,
and a lot of people use those features.

Don't put the count in JavaScript EVER. Client side code is totally
spoof-able.
All you need is the session data in the cookie to identify the user
and check to see if the response came quick enough.

Session data need not be stored in a cookie. There are other ways to do
it as well -- allow for those who won't (or can't) accept cookies.

···

On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 09:18:01AM +0900, John Joyce wrote:

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
McCloctnick the Lucid: "The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your
time waving your hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do."

Chad_Perrin1 · 5 July 2007 18:33

I don't think any website I've put together in the last six or seven
years is *best* viewed in Lynx, but they degrade gracefully enough so a
Lynx user can still get at the content without too much trouble,
generally. I use CSS pretty exclusively for styling these days, and
sometimes use JavaScript too, but I don't use either for core site
functionality without an alternative means of getting at content (like
the way Google Maps has a static version in case your browser can't
handle AJAX).

···

On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 11:02:21PM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

Chad Perrin wrote:
>
> I'd be worried about the JavaScript and CSS requirements. In fact, I
> won't use a system for validating humanity that doesn't work in Lynx,
> unless some other necessary functionality of the website absolutely
> cannot work in Lynx (such as Flash animations). Even then, I'd probably
> avoid something that won't work in Lynx, since (for example) a Lynx user
> could navigate to YouTube and do a search to find a particular video,
> then use youtube-dl to download it to the computer and play it using
> MPlayer. No in-browser support for Flash video needed. YouTube can be a
> useful website for a Lynx user -- so mine should be, too, since I don't
> even provide Flash videos as the main content of any of my websites.

I was once a proud member of the "This Web Site Best Viewed With Lynx"
club. Ah, the good old days, when a dollar was worth a dime, Netscape
was more popular than Internet Explorer and nobody's cat had a web page.
;). I learned HTML by editing that web page by hand and generating code
with Perl 4 on an HP100 Pocket PC.

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
McCloctnick the Lucid: "The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your
time waving your hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do."

Topic		Replies	Views
[ANN] flatulent-0.0.1 ascii captcha for the masses ruby-talk	6	89	3 July 2007
(unknown) ruby-talk	0	64	3 July 2007
[ANN] flatulent-0.0.3 ruby-talk	20	108	9 July 2007
[ANN] flatulent-0.0.2 - ajax gets stinky ruby-talk	11	81	5 July 2007
[ANN] Ruby/CAPTCHA 0.1.2 ruby-talk	0	88	29 March 2004

[ANN] flatulent-0.0.1 ascii captcha for the masses

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