History

• (Image Distortion) Captcha Invented in 1997
   
• Website Altavista used in 1997
   
• PayPal start using it in 2001
   
• The term was first used in 2003

Where can we find it ?

Websites

• Websites are common places to encounter Captchas.

CloudFlare

Apps

• Although not common, some apps can implement Google ReCaptcha to avoid bots.

Where to start?

• Verify if webpage correctly implements captcha.
   
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software available for captchas.

Some types of attack

• Static CAPTCHA Identifier
   
• Fixation Attack
   
• Re-Riding Attack
   
• OCR Bruteforce

https://www.owasp.org/images/0/03/ASDC12-Attacking_CAPTCHAs_for_Fun_and_Profit.pdf

Image Processing

Human Workforce

• https://anti-captcha.com/mainpage
  • 2$ USD per 1000 captchas
  • 17s solve speed
     
• https://2captcha.com/
  • 3$ USD per 1000 captchas
  • 49s solve speed

"I'm not a human: Breaking the Google reCAPTCHA"

March, 2016

https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-16/materials/asia-16-Sivakorn-Im-Not-a-Human-Breaking-the-Google-reCAPTCHA-wp.pdf

• Plays with cookies / user agent / etc.
• Trick website address with localhost.
• 2500 checkbox captchas per hour.
• Weekends had less blocking.
• Leverage Google Reverse Image Search, along other machine learning software.
• Image reused.

Voice Recognition

March, 2017

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researcher-breaks-recaptcha-using-googles-speech-recognition-api/

• Usage of SpeechRecognition library from Python
  • Google Speech Recognition
  • Google Cloud Speech API
  • Houndify API
  • Microsoft Bing Voice Recognition

Bypass via HTTP parameter pollution

March, 2018

https://andresriancho.com/recaptcha-bypass-via-http-parameter-pollution/

POST /recaptcha/api/siteverify

recaptcha-response=anything%26secret%3dPUBLIC-TEST-BYPASS_TOKEN&secret=6LeYIbsSAAAAAJezaIq3Ft_hSTo0YtyeFG-JgRtu

Bypass via HTTP parameter pollution

https://andresriancho.com/recaptcha-bypass-via-http-parameter-pollution/

Around ~3% of the integrations with reCAPTCHA were vulnerable.

Google Response

• Request frequency
   
• Normal, clear, voice sound to imperceptible voice sound (with distorsions)
   
• Clear image of cars, street sign, bridges, etc to noisy images, lower resolution images.
   
• Fixed select images to multiple images appearing with added delay.

Incremental Difficulty

• Raise number of digits in voice captcha.
   
• Tweek Advanced Risk Analysis System.
  • Less relaxed wrong answers / image checked box.
     
• Avoid image repetition.

Incremental Difficulty

CloudFlare

• Use CloudFlare DNS

https://www.cloudflare.com/case-studies/troy-hunt/

Implement on the code

• Go to Google ReCaptcha page.
   
• Follow instructions.
   
• Adjust security.

Verify ReCaptcha

• Get g-recaptcha-response from User.
   
• Verify on the back end the token sent.

POST https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/siteverify

secret=6LeIxAcTAAAAAGG-vFI1TnRWxMZNFuojJ4WifJWe&response=03ACgFB9smWHeHsOPEDTTb-OWMh-SgQISvttCGdp4tN4OW77W9r3bEeIHwd22EyQOmB466kdBm3SD26fMPeKByeXHJSKERi81bcH1b68ZwUU7W4m2TsAs65KzjUaE7t2uMffOR...2kMo4msFdLmj79uTeeCWaHZl2o5QqnF22qAImMSbxWMeMx5gC0O8SQINkmuPexXPHnpUmpzaqgI_WlseJI_q5VrDA

Verify ReCaptcha

{
  "success": true|false,
  "challenge_ts": timestamp,  // timestamp of the challenge load (ISO format yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZZ)
  "hostname": string,         // the hostname of the site where the reCAPTCHA was solved
  "error-codes": [...]        // optional
}

Why ReCaptcha ?

• State of the art CAPTCHA system.
   
• Always evolving.
   
• Easy to implement and to use.

Once a upon a time

A website that didn't ask for captcha with valuable information.

And 24 hours later ....

... and 100.000 requests, something weird appear.

https://code.google.com/archive/p/kaptcha/

But something was weird

AJAX request didn't contain CAPTCHA response.

• Old endpoint still enabled.
   
• New endpoint checked captcha.

1 Year later, they fixed

And for a couple of months, I didn't have a solution for this ...

... until ...

$ aptitude search ocr

Ocrad

GNU Ocrad is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program based on a feature extraction method. It reads a bitmap image in pbm or pgm formats and produces text in byte (8-bit) or UTF-8 formats.

 

Ocrad includes a layout analyser able to separate the columns or blocks of text normally found on printed pages.

https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/ocrad/

Prepare Image first

• Create better image to convert the IMAGE to TEXT
  
   
  • ​Remove background
     
  • Remove line
     
  • Connect missing space
     
  • Remove noise

Get various code of choose the best

• NoLine Corrected
   
• NoBackground Corrected
   
• NoBackground Corrected with _
   
• Validating the code obtained

Threshold

for ($i = 1; $i <= 9 ; $i++) {
    $v[$i] = self::correctCaptcha(
        trim(shell_exec("ocrad --threshold=0.".$i." ".$newFile))
    );
}

Use various threshold to obtain a better result

Improve final solution

• Check if size is 5.
   
• Check if characters are lowercase.
   
• Limited alphanumeric range.
   
• For each character find "_", and try to find another character in one of the 9 thresholds solutions.
   
• Remove "blank" character.

Table mapping

Run on some captchas with know solution ...

Success Rate

• Improved from initial 4% to 20%
• 1 success captcha solved in each 5 attempts.

But wait, we can do better.

What if we don't ask for a CAPTCHA ?

CAPTCHA marked as solved

While session is enabled, we just need to solve one captcha.

Re-Riding Attack

Idea

• Google allow good users to just click on "I'm not a robot"
  • Automate that click!

Idea

• Extract and use Google ReCaptcha validation token.
  • Implement recaptcha token acceptance on crawler to simulate recaptcha success behaviour.

POST http://www.example.com/get'
id=323184&gRecaptchaResponse={{gCaptchaToken}}

Field Research

• Crawlers tend to use TOR even more.
   
• ReCaptcha painly slow on TOR network (for obvious reasons 😄).
   
• Two requests are made:
  • www.google.com (colect ReCaptcha token)
  • www.example.com (to extract information)

Field Research

• Use normal connection to extract recaptcha token.
   
• Use TOR to request API information with above ReCaptcha token

Distributed ReCaptcha Solver

• Develop Chrome extension to install in multiple computers.
   
• Harvest google captcha token via commie.io
  • ​Note: The token has 120 seconds time expiration.

Inner works

• Try to not connect to the host website.
  • Block request and modify HTML page.
  • Not successful without editing /etc/hosts.
     
• Block all requests except the main page request.

Block all (most all) requests

chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest.addListener(function(data) {
  if (data.tabId == openedTabId 
           && data.url != "http://www.example.com/") {
      return {cancel: true};
    }
  }
},{'urls': ["*://*.example.com/*"]}, ["blocking"]);

Replace HTML

• Replace HTML to only contain Google ReCaptcha.

var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
var script = document.createElement('script');
script.type = 'text/javascript';
script.src = 'https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js?hl=pt_PT';
head.appendChild(script);

var body = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];
while (body.firstChild) { body.removeChild(body.firstChild); }

var div = document.createElement("div");
div.setAttribute("style", "float:left;");
div.setAttribute("class", "g-recaptcha");
div.setAttribute("data-sitekey", "1XLd32hUUA522B0Gx7htcAQmanD890ZyCCo2i5T");
body.appendChild(div);

Auto Click

if (document.querySelector(".recaptcha-checkbox") != null) {
  var delay = 3000 + Math.random() * 2000; // milliseconds
    setTimeout(function() {
      if (document.querySelector(".recaptcha-checkbox") != null) {
        document.querySelector(".recaptcha-checkbox").click();
      }
    }, delay);
}

• Inject in google iframe.

Wait for success

• Request with successfully captcha solved

https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/userverify?k=X8LdChUUA3AAAABgG302AQfn69kNDSnm23lbo

Possible solutions

• Machine Learning
  • Keras
  • TensorFlow

https://github.com/JackonYang/captcha-tensorflow
https://medium.com/@ageitgey/how-to-break-a-captcha-system-in-15-minutes-with-machine-learning-dbebb035a710

FunCaptcha