Text-based CAPTCHAs over the years

The notion of CAPTCHAs has been around for more than two decades. Since its introduction, CAPTCHAs have now become a ubiquitous part of the Internet. Over the years, research on various aspects of CAPTCHAs has evolved and different design principles have emerged. This article discusses text-based CAPTCHAs in terms of their fundamental requirements, namely, security and usability. Practicality necessitates that humans must be able to correctly solve CAPTCHA challenges, while at the same time automated computer programs should have difficulty solving the challenges. This article also presents alternative paradigms to text-based CAPTCHA design that have been examined in previous work. With the advances in techniques to defeat CAPTCHAs, the future of auto- mated Turing tests is an open question.