MyGovBC-CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA microservice

This project contains a microservice to enable you to easily include a CAPTCHA widget in my online digital form to protect your digital service from bots.

Git Checkout and initialization:

git clone [email protected]:bcgov/MyGovBC-CAPTCHA-Service.git
cd MyGovBC-CAPTCHA-Service/

You have two choices of configuring the service

1. add some environment variables
2. open server.js and change the default strings.

The following is a list of the environment variables:

• NODE_ENV

  If running in a production environment, you should set this to "production" to force you to se SECRET and PRIVATE_KEY accordingly.

• SECRET

  This should be the same on each server/service/pod that will need to verify the JWT created by any other server/service/pod.

• PRIVATE_KEY

  This is for encrypting the answer in the captcha for stateless verification on any other server/service/pod.

• WINSTON_HOST

  The remote host that winston service is running on, if using winston in your deployment.

• WINSTON_PORT

  The remote port that winston is listening on, if using winston in your deployment.

• LOG_LEVEL

  Set this to none/error/debug depending on how much verbosity to stderr/stdout you would like.

• SERVICE_PORT

  What port you want the service to run on, defaults to 3000.

• CAPTCHA_SIGN_EXPIRY

  Time in minutes you want to automatically expire the Captcha returned to clients (default: 15min)

• JWT_SIGN_EXPIRY

  Time in minutes you want to automatically expire the Service JWT returned to clients (default: 15min)

Preparing for dependencies:

npm install

This will download all the required dependencies for the project so that npm start/npm test will work.

Running the service:

npm start

Running the unit tests locally:

npm test

The tests cover the following cases:

1. Empty request on requesting a captcha (must fail)
2. Passing in a nonce for generating the captcha (must pass and return valid captcha
3. If either the captcha failed to generate, or the encrypted password sent with the request fails, the unit test will fail. (must pass)
4. The captcha is written to disk, and the default browser is used to open the captcha for viewing, the user must then input the correct captcha, or the test will fail (must pass)
5. Verifying the captcha (must pass)
6. Receiving and then sending back the signed JWT (must pass)

API Specification:

Request Type	API Endpoint	Parameters	Returns	Purpose
HTTP GET	/status		OK	Returns "OK" if the service is running
HTTP POST	/captcha	request body: { nonce: string }	{ "nonce": string, "captcha": string, "validation": JSON, "expiry": JWT}	Retrieve a captcha to be displayed to a user
HTTP POST	/verify/captcha	request body: { nonce: string, answer: string, validation: JSON }	{ valid: true/false, jwt: JWT }	Compare the answer to the encryptedAnswer, return a signed JWT if successful
HTTP POST	/verify/jwt	request body: { nonce: string, token: JWT }	{ valid: true/false }	Validate a signed JWT