Use of Human Cognition in HIP Design Via EmotIcons to Defend BOT Attacks

Many services in the internet including Email, search engine, social networking are provided with free of charge due to enormous growth of web users. With the expansion of web services, denial of service (DoS) attacks by malicious automated programs (e.g. web bots) is becoming a serious problem of web service accounts. In order to avoid tremendous attack from malicious computer programs, HIP, or Human Interactive Proofs has been introduced to distinguish humans from computers. HIPs are designed to be easy for humans but hard for machines. Unfortunately, the existing HIPs tried to maximize the difficulty for automated programs to pass tests by increasing distortion or noise. Consequently, it has also become difficult for potential users too. In our proposed technique we resolve this problem by making use of human cognitive processing abilities through emoticons focusing mainly on users. Features like language independence, using this for advertising purpose, ease of use interface for the touch-based smart-phone users, easy tuning of security and usability level make it very attractive to web service providers. In the result section, a microscopic large-scale user study was conducted involving 118 users to investigate the actual user views compare to existing state of the art CAPTCHA systems like ESP-PIX and Asirra in terms of usability and security and found our system can be solved with 88.04% average success rate in less than 7 seconds.