Abstract
Telephony systems are imperative for information exchange offering low cost services and reachability to millions of customers. They have not only benefited legitimate users but have also opened up a convenient communication medium for spammers. Voice spam is often encountered on telephony systems in various forms, such as by means of an automated telemarketing call asking to call a number to win a reward. A large percentage of voice spam is generated through automated system which introduces the classical challenge of distinguishing machines from humans on telephony systems. CAPTCHA is a conventional solution deployed on the web to address this problem. Audio-based CAPTCHAs have been proposed as a solution to curb voice spam. In this paper, we conducted a field study with 90 participants in order to answer two primary research questions: quantifying the amount of inconvenience telephony-based CAPTCHA may cause to users, and how various features of the CAPTCHA, such as duration and size, influence usability of telephony-based CAPTCHA. Our results suggest that currently proposed CAPTCHAs are far from usable, with very low solving accuracies, high solving times and poor overall user experience. We provide certain guidelines that may help improve existing CAPTCHAs for use in telephony systems.
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Notes
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Softphone is an application that allows a desktop, laptop or workstation computer to work as a telephone via Voice over IP technology e.g. Skype.
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FreeSWITCH is one of the open source telephony platforms which has enabled easy access to telephony often required by various businesses. http://www.freeswitch.org//.
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- 6.
Given that SUS is 68 for average usable system.http://www.measuringusability.com/sus.php.
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Are you human Captcha. Secure from All Angles, http://areyouahuman.com/security/.
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Acknowledgements
The research of the first author is supported by TCS (Tata Consultancy Service) Research Scholarship. We would like to thank Dr. Iulia Ion and Paridhi Jain for their input on the study. The authors would also like to thank International Development Research Centre (IRDC) and all members of PreCog research group at IIIT-Delhi. We would like to thank Siddhartha Asthana for helping in deployment of the system and all participants in the study.
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Sachdeva, N., Saxena, N., Kumaraguru, P. (2015). On the Viability of CAPTCHAs for use in Telephony Systems: A Usability Field Study. In: Desmedt, Y. (eds) Information Security. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7807. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27659-5_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27659-5_19
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