I recently wrote about a lightweight invisible CAPTCHA validator control I built as a defensive measure against comment spam. I wanted the control to work in as many situations as possible, so it doesn’t rely on ViewState nor Session since some users of the control may want to turn those things off.
Of course this begs the question, how do I know the answer submitted in the form is the answer to the question I asked? Remember, never trust your inputs, even form submissions can easily be tampered with.
Well one way is to give the client the answer in some manner that it can’t be read and can’t be tampered with. Encryption to the rescue!
Using a few new objects from the System.Security.Cryptography namespace in .NET 2.0, I quickly put together code that would encrypt the answer along with the current system time into a base 64 encoded string. That string would then be placed in a hidden input field.
When the form is submitted, I made sure that the encrypted value contained the answer and that the date inside was not too old, thus defeating replay attacks.
The first change was to initialize the encryption algorithm via a static constructor.
The code can be hard to read in a browser, so I did include the source code in the download link at the end of this post.
static SymmetricAlgorithm encryptionAlgorithm
= InitializeEncryptionAlgorithm();
static SymmetricAlgorithm InitializeEncryptionAlgorithm()
{
SymmetricAlgorithm rijaendel = RijndaelManaged.Create();
rijaendel.GenerateKey();
rijaendel.GenerateIV();
return rijaendel;
}
With that in place, I added a couple static methods to the control.
static SymmetricAlgorithm InitializeEncryptionAlgorithm()
{
SymmetricAlgorithm rijaendel = RijndaelManaged.Create();
rijaendel.GenerateKey();
rijaendel.GenerateIV();
return rijaendel;
}
public static string EncryptString(string clearText)
{
byte[] clearTextBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(clearText);
byte[] encrypted = encryptionAlgorithm.CreateEncryptor()
.TransformFinalBlock(clearTextBytes, 0
, clearTextBytes.Length);
return Convert.ToBase64String(encrypted);
}
In the PreRender method I simply took the answer, appended the date using a pipe character as a separator, encrypted the whole stew, and the slapped it in a hidden form field.
//Inside of OnPreRender
Page.ClientScript.RegisterHiddenField
(this.HiddenEncryptedAnswerFieldName
, EncryptAnswer(answer));
string EncryptAnswer(string answer)
{
return EncryptString(answer
+ "|"
+ DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm"));
}
Now with all that in place, when the user submits the form, I can determine if the answer is valid by grabbing the value from the form field, calling decrypt on it, splitting it using the pipe character as a delimiter, and examining the result.
protected override bool EvaluateIsValid()
{
string answer = GetClientSpecifiedAnswer();
string encryptedAnswerFromForm =
Page.Request.Form[this.HiddenEncryptedAnswerFieldName];
if(String.IsNullOrEmpty(encryptedAnswerFromForm))
return false;
string decryptedAnswer = DecryptString(encryptedAnswerFromForm);
string[] answerParts = decryptedAnswer.Split('|');
if(answerParts.Length < 2)
return false;
string expectedAnswer = answerParts[0];
DateTime date = DateTime.ParseExact(answerParts[1]
, "yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
if ((DateTime.Now - date).Minutes > 30)
{
this.ErrorMessage = "Sorry, but this form has expired.
Please submit again.";
return false;
}
return !String.IsNullOrEmpty(answer)
&& answer == expectedAnswer;
}
// Gets the answer from the client, whether entered by
// javascript or by the user.
private string GetClientSpecifiedAnswer()
{
string answer = Page.Request.Form[this.HiddenAnswerFieldName];
if(String.IsNullOrEmpty(answer))
answer = Page.Request.Form[this.VisibleAnswerFieldName];
return answer;
}
This technique could work particularly well for a visible CAPTCHA control as well. The request for a CAPTCHA image is an asynchronous request and the code that renders that image has to know which CAPTCHA image to render. Implementations I’ve seen simply store an image in the CACHE using a GUID as a key when rendering the control. Thus when the asynchronous request to grab the CAPTCHA image arrives, the CAPTCHA image rendering HttpHandler looks up the image using the GUID and renders that baby out.
Using encryption, the URL for the CAPTCHA image could embed the answer (aka the word to render).
If you are interested, you can download an updated binary and source code for the Invisible CAPTCHA control which now includes the symmetric encryption from here.