Breaking Audio Captchas for IRCTC Booking Automization

CAPTCHAs are computer generated tests in the form of images, audios and object recognition that world can communicate easily and computer systems cannot. Internet sites present users with captchas to set apart human users from false computer programs, often referred to as bots. Their purpose is to obstruct attackers from performing automatic registration, online polling and other such actions. IRCTC, being the website to reserve tickets for Indian railways, one of the biggest railway network, has also employed both image and audio captchas for security purposes. However, the audio captchas used on the website are not effective in distinguishing between humans and bots. Most of the visual CAPTCHAs and some audio CAPTCHAs on different websites have been cracked using various methods of machine learning and we propound an identical idea to examine the security of audio CAPTCHAs on IRCTC website. In this paper, we show that our bot is able to break the IRCTC audio captchas with a success rate of 98%, 96.04% and 80.3% using three different models. Along with breaking the captcha, another python script written by us was able to automate the process of ticket booking. Thus, combining all of it into a single package could result in a system which would login and reserve tickets only by a single click. Travel brokers can easily use such a system for easy and fast booking of tatkal tickets which would lead to commercializing this activity for deriving huge profit from needy travelers.