To improve the security of its service, Snapchat recently introduced a verification system in which the user must prove that he is not a robot. To do so, the user is invited to click on the images on the screen where a ghost appears. If the test is successful, the user will then create an account. Snapchat reserve system to new entrants.
Apparently, Snapchat's spot-the-ghost human verification tool isn't all that clever -- Steven Hickson has already written software that circumvents the anti-bot feature. However, the ghosts have not managed to scare hackers and other developers who have already created a whole system to bypass this check. Steve Hickson presented his hack on his blog. According to him, it took only 30 minutes to get and obtain a solution able to recognize the different points of each ghost and then match them with a model. His technique simply finds the best matches between Snapchat's sample pictures and a reference image. It's not flawless, but it's still accurate -- no mean feat for something that took less than an hour to program. Whether or not there will be a fix isn't clear.
In the end, less than 100 lines of code were written to have this hack. "I'm not saying it is perfect, far from it. I'm just saying that if it takes less than an hour for someone to tell a computer to break an example of your human verification system, you are doing something wrong." Hickson indirectly indicates Snapchat that its system is far too simple and can be bypassed without any real difficulty.
At this stage, the company will only tell us that it's making "significant progress" in locking down its chat service. While the statement hints that more security measures are on the way, it doesn't guarantee that Snapchat will defeat Hickson's code.
Snapchat knows many security concerns. Remember, Three weeks later, a hacker was able to steal 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers. An update of iOS and Android applications had to happen to change the system and unlink the phone number. More recently, spam arrived in users. Snapchat reviewing its copy to improve service with several million users worldwide.
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SOURCE : @DSM_CORP
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