unCaptcha – Low Resource Defeat of reCaptcha’s Audio Challenge

Aross the Internet, hundreds of thousands of sites rely on Google’s reCaptcha system for defense against bots (in fact, Devpost uses reCaptcha when creating a new account). After a Google research team demonstrated a near complete defeat of the text reCaptcha in 2012, the reCaptcha system evolved to rely on audio and image challenges, historically more difficult challenges for automated systems to solve. Google has continually iterated on its design, releasing a newer and more powerful version as recently as just this year. Successfully demonstrating a defeat of this captcha system spells significant vulnerability for hundreds of thousands of popular sites.

What it does

unCaptcha system has attack capabilities written for the audio captcha. Using browser automation software, we can interact with the target website and engage with the captcha, parsing out the necessary elements to begin the attack. We rely primarily on the audio captcha attack – by properly identifying spoken numbers, we can pass the reCaptcha programmatically and fool the site into thinking our bot is a human. Specifically, unCaptcha targets the popular site Reddit by going through the motions of creating a new user, although unCaptcha stops before creating the user to mitigate the impact on Reddit.

Download