European Commission logo
Englishen
ISA² - Interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens

Developing an open source CAPTCHA

EU Captcha

2018.08 EU-Captcha - FUNDING CONCLUDED

When is this action of interest to you? 

A CAPTCHA is a test intended to distinguish human from machine input. The objective is to offer to EU Member States an open source CAPTCHA released under the European Union Public License (EUPL) that is maintained by the European Commission, secure, user-friendly and multilingual. It will be delivered as a component that can be operated as a service. A CAPTCHA with such characteristics does not exist on the market. The solution delivered will be published on the GitHub platform so that it can be reviewed and maintained by the open source community. The action will also conduct a study investigating how to further extend the CAPTCHA with features that improve the user experience by replacing scrambled letters and numbers with more innovative and less intrusive approaches (e.g. gesture analysis, animations, images). The aim is to implement the conclusions of the study in the coming years.

What is this action about? 

A CAPTCHA is a test intended to distinguish human from machine input. The objective of this action is to offer to the Member States an open source CAPTCHA released under the EUPL (European Union Public License) that is maintained, secure, user friendly and multilingual. It will be delivered as a component that can be operated as a service. A CAPTCHA with such characteristics does not exist on the market. The delivered solution will be published on GitHub so that it can be reviewed and maintained by the open source community.

In addition, the action will conduct a study investigating how to further extend the CAPTCHA with features improving the user experience by replacing scrambled letters and numbers with more innovative and less intrusive approaches (e.g. gesture analysis, animations, images, etc.). The intention will be to implement the conclusions of the study in the following years.

What are the objectives?

The CAPTCHA will be implemented in Java and will be usable as a component via an API or operable as a service and accessible via a protocol. Recent versions of most JEE application servers will be supported, such as Tomcat, Weblogic, JBoss and Websphere. Most recent browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Safari will be supported on the client side.