Captcha me if you can: Imitation Games with Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Since their inception, Captchas have been widely used as reverse Turing tests for combating bot proliferation on the web. This has resulted in an arms race between bot developers that automate Captcha solvers and Captcha services that adjust the challenges accordingly or come up with new ones altogether. Ultimately, older generations could be bypassed consistently, and thus in the third version of reCAPTCHA, Google offers zero user friction. The intent in the new system is not only to avoid interrupting user experience but to also obfuscate the nature of the challenge itself, being much less prominent than a text or image recognition task.

We introduce a methodology that learns through interaction how to evade detection, while collecting and analyzing reCAPTCHA v3 scores over fifteen months and various web environments. With reinforcement learning as the backbone, we build models that can simulate human-like web browsing behaviour by using the returned score as an informative signal. Our study exposes an important vulnerability: while the score is influenced by a multitude of undisclosed factors, it is easily accessible and it enables adversaries to learn and perfect evasive models. Notably, we demonstrate that our automation models, which integrate general web browsing capabilities, transfer between websites with an evasion rate up to 99.6%.