A few days ago we saw a post from [samuirai] at the Shackspace hackerspace in Stuttgart on breaking the minteye captcha system. Like most other captcha cracks, [samuirai] used the voice accessibility option that provides an audio captcha for blind users. Using the accessibility option is a wonderful piece of work, but [Jack] came up with an even more elegant way to defeat the minteye captcha.
For those unfamiliar, the minteye captcha provides a picture tossed through a swirl filter with a slider underneath. Move the slider left or right to eliminate the swirl and you’ve passed the, “are you human” test. Instead of looking for straight lines, [Jack] came up with a solution that easily defeats the minteye captcha in 23 lines of Python: just minimize the length of all the edges found in the pic.
The idea behind the crack is simply the more you swirl an image, the longer the edges in the image become. Edge detection is a well-studied problem, so the only thing the minteye cracking script needed to do was to move the slider for the captcha from the left to the right and measure the lengths of all the edges.
[Jack] included the code for image processing part of his crack, fortunately leaving out the part where he returns an answer to the minteye captcha. For that, and a very elegant way to crack a captcha, we thank him.
Filed under: security hacks
