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Exploring the influence of CAPTCHA types to the users response time by statistical analysis

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Abstract

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is a test program that solves a given task for preventing the attacks made by automatic programs. If the response to CAPTCHA is correct, then the program classifies the user as a human. This paper introduces a new analysis of the impact of different CAPTCHAs to the Internet user’s response time. It overcomes the limitations of the previous approaches in the state-of-the-art. In this sense, different types of CAPTCHAs are presented and described. Furthermore, an experiment is conducted, which is based on two populations of Internet users for text and image-based CAPTCHA types, differentiated by demographic features, such as age, gender, education level and Internet experience. Each user is required to solve the different types of CAPTCHA, and the response time to solve the CAPTCHAs is registered. The obtained results are statistically processed by Mann-Whitney U and Pearson’s correlation coefficient tests. They analyze 7 different hypotheses which evaluate the response time in dependence of gender, age, education level and Internet experience, for the different CAPTCHA types. It represents an invaluable study in the literature to predict the best use of a given CAPTCHA for specific types of Internet users.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are fully grateful to Sanja Petrovska for collecting the data, and to anonymous users for providing their data. This study was partially funded by the Grant of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia, as a part of the project TR33037 within the framework of the Technological development program.

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Correspondence to Darko Brodić.

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Author Darko Brodić declares that he has no conflict of interest. Author Alessia Amelio declares that she has no conflict of interest. Author Radmila Janković declares that she has no conflict of interest.

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This article does not contain any dangerous study with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Funding

This study was partially funded by the Grant of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia, as a part of the project TR33037 within the framework of the Technological development program. The receiver of the funding is Dr. Darko Brodić.

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Brodić, D., Amelio, A. & Janković, R. Exploring the influence of CAPTCHA types to the users response time by statistical analysis. Multimed Tools Appl 77, 12293–12329 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4883-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4883-7

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