Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.

Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. By using reCAPTCHA, you can protect your site from abuse and help digitize books at the same time.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://recaptcha.net/
License: License Free

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Google Webmaster Central Blog published Quick security checklist for webmasters. They encourage webmasters to “please try the following at home,” this is by no means an exhaustive list for your website’s security. The list is useful, but they recommend that you conduct more thorough research as well.

Nathan Johns said
“In recent months, there’s been a noticeable increase in the number of compromised websites around the web. One explanation is that people are resorting to hacking sites in order to distribute malware or attempt to spam search results. Regardless of the reason, it’s a great time for all of us to review helpful webmaster security tips.”

Requirements: No Requirements
Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/quick-security…
License: N/A

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aSSL is a library distributed under MIT License thats implements a technology similar to SSL without HTTPS. aSSL enables the client to negotiate a secret random 128-bit key with the server using the RSA algorithm. Once the connection has been established, the data will be sent and received using AES algorithm. aSSL is composed of some Javascript files and a server side component. A pure Javascript (ASP) server component is currently available. They will do a porting for the main web languages (PHP, Java, Perl, Python, TKL, etc.) as soon as possible once the aSSL has passed the beta phase.

Requirements: ASP Server
Demo: http://assl.sullof.com/assl/asp_example/example1.asp
License: MIT License

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