A survey of CAPTCHA technologies to distinguish between human and computer

Abstract CAPTCHA, Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, is widely used as a security mechanism to classify human and computer. This security mechanism is based on the Turing Test, which has been conceived to ensure network security. Usability is another fundamental issue, which can avoid human users proceeding tedious and time-consuming operation. CAPTCHA design should consider security and usability simultaneously. This paper provides a review on the development of CAPTCHA technologies for human and computer classification, along with their applications and instantiations. Different from previous CAPTCHA survey, this review discusses the CAPTCHA mechanism from usability and security aspects, therefore attacking (anti-classification) and defending (classification) technologies towards current CAPTCHA are both reviewed. Besides, recent emerging CAPTCHA and the attacking techniques are also introduced in this paper, such as game CAPTCHA, deep learning-based attacking, and etc.