Registration Page Security Question 1

[ietprofessional]

This isn't an ASP.NET question really, but I will be using ASP.NET to create my own registration page.

When you register to sign up for a yahoo mail account, at the very end of the registration you have to type a word that is displayed as an image to add security to the registration. I always thought that this was a security addition created so that people couldn't create a program to automatically register over and over again. Does anyone know why this is an important security implemention? and if I was right about this?

Thanks,
Harold

 

[vergilius]

Yes you right. It is about security. It's protection from robotic registration (against scripts that can make mass registrations).

 

[ietprofessional]

Why does it have to be an image? Why can't it be normal text. I'm asking because I was going to create a tool that would randomly choose a word from my db and then make the user type the text, then on the page compare the entered text to the random word label.

Is there something else involved in yahoo posting an image on there registration page?

Thanks,
Harold

 

[vergilius]

It cannot be just text becouse then robotic program will be able get content of page and find this text and insert it into reguested field, so it must be images.

There is enather couple things.
The image if you will look it closely kind looks dirty, it have points, lines and don't look clean, its made against programms that can read images and by pixels tell what char is there.

And also, the images don't have stright link, if you check the source it's looks like something strange. For exemple normal picture will have path looks like this

http://www.mypage.com/image.jpg

but there link to image looks like

http://www.mypage.com/default.aspx?id=12345

(the links is just for exemple).

 

[BoulderBum]

You can get one such security control FREE with an ASP.NET Starter Kit (along with $1000+ worth of other controls, also at no cost).

The control is made by Sax.net. It's kind of ugly, and has obligatory text, but it's definately worth a look.

You also get a pretty robust spell-checker from Telerik, and a couple of charting tools.

Check it out:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/asprk/