Slowing down spamming! Hashcash challenge in com

Slowing down spamming! Hashcash challenge in com_akocomment

Thursday, 24 February 2005 23:01

So I have just finished and test the integration of a hashcash challenge (MD5) into the com_akocomment component...using the code of this page http://dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/wp-hashcash/trunk/ only an extract but all credit to original authors:

C.S. - www.cimmanon.org
Gene Shepherd - www.imporium.org
John F -www.stonegauge.com
Magenson - http://blog.magenson.de/
Matt Mullenweg - photomatt.net
Matt Warden - www.mattwarden.com
Paul Andrew Johnston - pajhome.org.uk
and to Arthur Konze, the author of com_akocomment : This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

I must also pack everything into a new version of the component or better say refactored the code a little bit, because it is still full of debug statements...

Principle:
robot wo want to submit spam comments must pay the prize (using cpu time, approx. 100 hashcash max. each minute on a high end computer) and compute manually (can not be automated by submitting directly to the form) a Hashcash (www.Hashcash.org)

Extract form the document of wp-hashcash:
"Wordpress Hashcash
Introduction:
Taking Mattâs stopgap spam solution, which sends precomputed hashes to be echoed back by the user-agentâs form, Iâve added dynamic generation of the md5 hash. Rather than write it to a hidden field, we wait until the form is submitted to compute the hash. This prevents spammers from automatically scraping the form, because anyone wanting to submit a comment *must* execute the javascript md5.
This plugin used to be called âSpam Stopgap Extreme.â? Now itâs been moved to the WP plugins repository under the new name âWordpress Hashcash.â? All future development will take place through the plugins repository.
New Features:

Log and emailing of spam, for your records
Client-side hash required.
The âKeyâ? is hashed once before output to the html formâso spammers canât make sense of it, and then hashed on the client side, again.
The âKeyâ? is now a time-dependent, visitor dependent hash, for more variability. You canât just compute the right md5 once, because itâs always changing.
Failure to compute the md5 hash results in a 1 minute timeout penalty. "

Expect a release before week end...But I must also inform Arthur Konze first for a feedback
Then I will add the same code in login page (because generizing the code),in order to avoid brute forcing password in admin login page....and in guestbook (because I was spammed many times last week)

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