Publication Data
Balancing Usability and Security in a Video CAPTCHA
Abstract: We present a technique for using a content-based video
labeling task as a CAPTCHA. Our video CAPTCHAs are generated from YouTube videos, which
contain labels (tags) supplied by the person that uploaded the video. They are graded
using a video's tags, as well as tags from related videos. In a user study involving
184 participants, we were able to increase the average human success rate on our video
CAPTCHA from roughly 70% to 90%, while keeping the average success rate of a tag
frequency-based attack fixed at around 13%. Through a different parameterization of the
challenge generation and grading algorithms, we were able to reduce the success rate of
the same attack to 2%, while still increasing the human success rate from 70% to 75%.
The usability and security of our video CAPTCHA appears to be comparable to existing
CAPTCHAs, and a majority of participants (60%) indicated that they found the video
CAPTCHAs more enjoyable than traditional CAPTCHAs in which distorted text must be
transcribed.
