Adding a CAPTCHA to the sign in portlet

Sayfullah Jumoorty, modified 5 Months ago.

Adding a CAPTCHA to the sign in portlet

New Member Posts: 2 Join Date: 3/28/25 Recent Posts

Good Day,

I know that CAPTCHA's can be enabled on user registration and password forgot pages, but how would I go about adding it to the login page?

Reason being is due to the hard lockout mechanism. If a third party has a list of valid user usernames, then they can easily use bots to brute force the login page and hard lockout users, essentially a denial-of-service attack.

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Jamie Sammons, modified 5 Months ago.

RE: Adding a CAPTCHA to the sign in portlet

Expert Posts: 367 Join Date: 9/5/14 Recent Posts

Feature Request Created: https://liferay.atlassian.net/browse/LPD-52321

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Zsigmond Rab, modified 5 Months ago.

RE: RE: Adding a CAPTCHA to the sign in portlet

Liferay Master Posts: 764 Join Date: 1/5/10 Recent Posts

Hi Sayfullah,

Curently our recommendation is using password policies to prevent brute force attacks and there is no plan to change this. This is a much more common method than CAPTCHA. It's insanely easy to break CAPTCHA.

Regards,
Zsigmond

Sayfullah Jumoorty, modified 4 Months ago.

RE: RE: Adding a CAPTCHA to the sign in portlet

New Member Posts: 2 Join Date: 3/28/25 Recent Posts

Hi Zsigmond,

I wanted to clarify the issue we're facing regarding account security. The primary concern isn't just about enforcing strong password policies. The real challenge is that if an attacker has a list of usernames, they can launch a denial of service (DoS) attack. This happens because our hard lockout mechanism, which is essential to prevent brute force attacks, locks users out after a certain number of failed login attempts.

Even with strong passwords, this lockout mechanism is necessary to protect our server from brute force attacks. However, it also means that legitimate users can be locked out if an attacker repeatedly attempts to log in with their usernames.

To mitigate this, implementing a CAPTCHA adds an additional layer of security. It requires anyone attempting to log in to solve a CAPTCHA, which significantly increases the computational power needed for an attacker to carry out a brute force attack. This makes it much harder for them to succeed.

Could we consider adding this as a future feature? Similar to how we have a toggle for the register and password reset pages, we could add a toggle for the login page to enable CAPTCHA or not.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

Best regards,
Sayfullah

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Zsigmond Rab, modified 4 Months ago.

RE: RE: Adding a CAPTCHA to the sign in portlet

Liferay Master Posts: 764 Join Date: 1/5/10 Recent Posts

Hi Sayfullah,

I see. I believe, it’ll be achiavable with the https://liferay.atlassian.net/browse/LPD-6378 and with https://liferay.atlassian.net/browse/LPD-6353 it’ll be even more customizable.

Regards,
Zsigmond

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