Everything You Need To Know About CAPTCHA in a Nutshell

Many websites that allow members of its online audience to input and submit personal information employ a barrier to entry that is colloquially referred to as the CAPTCHA, which is often presented as a small game that requires a light level of user engagement to pass. A common form of the CAPTCHA concept is one that presents the user several pictures and asks them to visually identify which ones satisfy specific criteria. Presumably, only a human being can actually interpret the contents of an image and be able to correctly answer the test; this ensures that automated bots deployed by external sources cannot steal their way into a website's infrastructure and cause destructive mischief.

CAPTCHA, as an acronym, does not necessarily imply something being "captured," though it can be seen as thematically reflecting that it is a system that "catches" malicious bots and allows only the intended human users to get into the site. The "PT" portion stands for the phrase "Public Turing test," which was originally a proposed test of whether a machine could exhibit behavior not unlike that of a human. In this context, however, the test exist strictly to disqualify any "client" that exhibits overly machine-like behavior. The concept of telling "Computers and Humans Apart" in this fashion is what the "CHA" segment at the end references, and the "Completely Automated" nature of the test is reflected by the "CA" letters at the start of the acronym.

Hypothetically, a CAPTCHA can be presented as any sort of game and with any level of complexity. It can even resemble video games such as the classic first person shooter, DOOM, where one might move their cursor within the CAPTCHA's window and click in order to shoot graphical representations of demons. CAPTCHA system designers must always be aware, however, that the automated bots these colorful security measures strive to block are always being developed to become better at bypassing those very barriers. If the coding behind the game-like system is overly simplistic for an outside system to parse, then bots could feasibly "solve" the game by themselves. For more information click here https://vivirenremoto.github.io/doomcaptcha/.