KittenAuth: a New Approach to Human-Verification

Say Hello to the Kittens

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Monday, April 10, 2006; 02:48 AM

An innovative way to deter automatic registration has been introduced to the public and is attracting huge interest.  Instead of the popular verification through typing of slightly deformed text, the author of KittenAuth proposes to fight spam with pictures of kittens. The idea dwells on the premise that the human eye is a unique instrument in its ability to recognize kittens from other small animals (live demo at http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauthtest).

The tongue-in-cheek verification system seems to attract the attention of the masses.  According to author Oli Warner, "the site has passed the stress test though having handed out 4.2 million requests from a total of 36,000 users using 10 gigs of bandwidth over a 48 hour period."  KittenAuth is a pet project, released under noncommercial share alike Creative Commons license.

With constant improvements in OCR technology and spam-bots in mind, the author created an ASP.net application that lets the user select three pictures of kittens out of a 3x3 grid of images. The users passes the human-verification test if she picks out the kittens form squirrels, chickens, etc.  A 3x3 grid allows for 84 combinations, when selecting a series of three pictures.  With a series of four the number of combination rises to 126.

The KittenAuth test is described in much detail at http://www.thepcspy.com/articles/security/the_cutest_humantest_kittenauth. 

The KittenAuth test