Post Syndicated from Mari Galicer original https://blog.cloudflare.com/verified-bots-with-cryptography/

As a site owner, how do you know which bots to allow on your site, and which you’d like to block? Existing identification methods rely on a combination of IP address range (which may be shared by other services, or change over time) and user-agent header (easily spoofable). These have limitations and deficiencies. In our last blog post, we proposed using HTTP Message Signatures: a way for developers of bots, agents, and crawlers to clearly identify themselves by cryptographically signing requests originating from their service. 

Since we published the blog post on Message Signatures and the IETF draft for Web Bot Auth in May 2025, we’ve seen significant interest around implementing and deploying Message Signatures at scale. It’s clear that well-intentioned bot owners want a clear way to identify their bots to site owners, and site owners want a clear way to identify and manage bot traffic. Both parties seem to agree that deploying cryptography for the purposes of authentication is the right solution.     

Today, we’re announcing that we’re integrating HTTP Message Signatures directly into our Verified Bots Program. This announcement has two main parts: (1) for bots, crawlers, and agents, we’re simplifying enrollment into the Verified Bots program for those who sign requests using Message Signatures, and (2) we’re encouraging all bot operators moving forward to use Message Signatures over existing verification mechanisms. Because Verified Bots are considered authenticated, they do not face challenges from our Bot Management to identify as bots, given they’re already identified as such.

For site owners, no additional action is required – Cloudflare will automatically validate signatures on our edge, and if that validation is a success, that traffic will be marked as verified so that site owners can use the verified bot fields to create Bot Management and WAF rules based on it.  

This isn’t just about simplifying things for bot operators — it’s about giving website owners unparalleled accuracy in identifying trusted bot traffic, cutting down on the overhead for cryptographic verification, and fundamentally transforming how we manage authentication across the Cloudflare network.

Cloudflare’s existing Verified Bots program is for bots that are transparent about who they are and what they do, like indexing sites for search or scanning for security vulnerabilities. You can see a list of these verified bots in Cloudflare Radar:

^{A preview of the Verified Bots page on Cloudflare Radar.} 

In the past, in order to apply to be a verified bot, we used to ask for IP address ranges or reverse DNS names so that we could verify your identity. This required some manual steps like checking that the IP address range is valid and is associated with the appropriate ASN. 

With the integration of Message Signatures, we’re aiming to streamline applications into our Verified Bot program. Bots applying with well-formed Message Signatures will be prioritized, and approved more quickly! 

In order to make generating Message Signatures as easy as possible, Cloudflare is providing two open source libraries: a web-bot-auth library in rust, and a web-bot-auth npm package in TypeScript. If you’re working on a different implementation, let us know – we’d love to add it to our developer docs!

At a high level, signing your requests with web bot auth consists of the following steps: 

• Generate a valid signing key. See Signing Key section for step-by-step instructions.

• Host a JSON web key set containing your public key under /.well-known/http-message-signature-directory of your website.

• Sign responses for that URL using a Web Bot Auth library, one signature for each key contained in it, to prove you own it. See the Hosting section for step-by-step instructions.

• Register that URL with us, using our Verified Bots form. This can be done directly in your Cloudflare account. See our documentation.

• Sign requests using a Web Bot Auth library. 

As an example, Cloudflare Radar’s URL Scanner lets you scan any URL and get a publicly shareable report with security, performance, technology, and network information. Here’s an example of what a well-formed signature looks like for requests coming from URL Scanner:

GET /path/to/resource HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Signature-Agent: "https://web-bot-auth-directory.radar-cfdata-org.workers.dev"
Signature-Input: sig=("@authority" "signature-agent");\
             	 created=1700000000;\
             	 expires=1700011111;\
             	 keyid="poqkLGiymh_W0uP6PZFw-dvez3QJT5SolqXBCW38r0U";\
             	 tag="web-bot-auth"
Signature:sig=jdq0SqOwHdyHr9+r5jw3iYZH6aNGKijYp/EstF4RQTQdi5N5YYKrD+mCT1HA1nZDsi6nJKuHxUi/5Syp3rLWBA==:

Since we’ve already registered URLScanner as a Verified Bot, Cloudflare will now automatically verify that the signature in the Signature header matches the request — more on that later.

Access the Verified Bots submission form on your account. If that link does not immediately take you there, go to your Cloudflare account →  Account Home  → the three dots next to your account name  → Configurations → Verified Bots.

If you do not have a Cloudflare account, you can sign up for a free one.

For the verification method, select “Request Signature”, then enter the URL of your key directory in Validation Instructions. Specifying the User-Agent values is optional if you’re submitting a Request Signature bot. 

Once your application has gone through our (now shortened) review process, you don’t need to take any further action.

Starting today, Cloudflare is ramping up verification of cryptographic signatures provided by automated crawlers and bots. This is currently available for all Free and Pro plans, and as we continue to test and validate at scale, will be released to all Business and Enterprise plans. This means that as time passes, the number of unauthenticated web crawlers should diminish, ensuring most bot traffic is authenticated before it reaches your website’s servers, helping to prevent spoofing attacks. 

At a high level, signature verification works like this: 

1. A bot or agent sends a request to a website behind Cloudflare.

2. Cloudflare’s Message Signature verification service checks for the Signature, Signature-Input, and Signature-Agent headers.

3. It checks that the incoming request presents a keyid parameter in your Signature-Input that points to a key we already know.

4. It looks at the expires parameter in the incoming bot request. If the current time is after expiration, verification fails. This guards against replay attacks, preventing malicious agents from trying to pass as a bot by retrying messages they captured in the past.

5. It checks that you’ve specified a tag parameter indicating web-bot-auth, to indicate your intent that the message be handled using web bot authentication specifically

6. It looks at all the components chosen in your Signature-Input header, and constructs a signature base from it. 

7. If all pre-flight checks pass, Cloudflare attempts to verify the signature base against the value in Signature field using an ed25519 verification algorithm and the key supplied in keyid.

8. Verified Bots and other systems at Cloudflare use a successful verification as proof of your identity, and apply rules corresponding to that identity. 

If any of the above steps fail, Cloudflare falls back to existing bot identification and mitigation mechanisms. As the system matures, we would strengthen these requirements, and limit the possibilities of a soft downgrade.

As a site owner, you can segment your Verified Bot traffic by its type and purpose by adding the Verified Bot Categories field cf.verified_bot_category as a filter criterion in WAF Custom rules, Advanced Rate Limiting, and Late Transform rules. For instance, to allow the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Library of Congress, and institutions dedicated to academic research, you can add a rule that allows bots in the Academic Research category.

HTTP Message Signatures is a primitive that is useful beyond Cloudflare – the IETF standardized it as part of RFC 9421.

As discussed in our previous blog post, Cloudflare believes that making Message Signatures a core component of bot authentication on the web should follow the same path. The specifications for the protocol are being built in the open, and they have already evolved following feedback.

Moreover, due to widespread interest, the IETF is considering forming a working group around Web Bot Auth. Should you be a crawler, an origin, or even a CDN, we invite you to provide feedback to ensure the solution gets stronger, and suits your needs.

For bot, agent, and crawler operators that act transparently and provide vital services for the Internet, we’re providing a faster and more automated path to being recognized as a Verified Bot, reducing manual processes. We trust that this approach improves bot authentication from what were formerly brittle and unreliable authentication methods, to a secure and reliable alternative. It should reduce the overall volume of friction and hurdles genuinely useful bots face.

For site owners, Message Signatures provides better assurance that the bot traffic is legitimate — automatically recognized and allowed, minimizing disruption to essential services (e.g., search engine indexing, monitoring). In line with our commitments to making TLS/SSL and Post-Quantum certificates available for everyone, we’ll always offer the cryptographic verification of Message Signatures for all sites because we believe in a safer and more efficient Internet by fostering a trusted environment for both human and automated traffic.

If you have a feature request, feedback, or are interested in partnering with us, please reach out.

Post Syndicated from Thibault Meunier original https://blog.cloudflare.com/web-bot-auth/

With the rise of traffic from AI agents, what’s considered a bot is no longer clear-cut. There are some clearly malicious bots, like ones that DoS your site or do credential stuffing, and ones that most site owners do want to interact with their site, like the bot that indexes your site for a search engine, or ones that fetch RSS feeds.      

Historically, Cloudflare has relied on two main signals to verify legitimate web crawlers from other types of automated traffic: user agent headers and IP addresses. The User-Agent header allows bot developers to identify themselves, i.e. MyBotCrawler/1.1. However, user agent headers alone are easily spoofed and are therefore insufficient for reliable identification. To address this, user agent checks are often supplemented with IP address validation, the inspection of published IP address ranges to confirm a crawler’s authenticity. However, the logic around IP address ranges representing a product or group of users is brittle – connections from the crawling service might be shared by multiple users, such as in the case of privacy proxies and VPNs, and these ranges, often maintained by cloud providers, change over time.

Cloudflare will always try to block malicious bots, but we think our role here is to also provide an affirmative mechanism to authenticate desirable bot traffic. By using well-established cryptography techniques, we’re proposing a better mechanism for legitimate agents and bots to declare who they are, and provide a clearer signal for site owners to decide what traffic to permit. 

Today, we’re introducing two proposals – HTTP message signatures and request mTLS – for friendly bots to authenticate themselves, and for customer origins to identify them. In this blog post, we’ll share how these authentication mechanisms work, how we implemented them, and how you can participate in our closed beta.

Historically, if you’ve worked on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other agent, you’ve had several options to identify your HTTP traffic to other services: 

1. You define a user agent, an HTTP header described in RFC 9110. The problem here is that this header is easily spoofable and there’s not a clear way for agents to identify themselves as semi-automated browsers — agents often use the Chrome user agent for this very reason, which is discouraged. The RFC states:
   “If a user agent masquerades as a different user agent, recipients can assume that the user intentionally desires to see responses tailored for that identified user agent, even if they might not work as well for the actual user agent being used.”  

2. You publish your IP address range(s). This has limitations because the same IP address might be shared by multiple users or multiple services within the same company, or even by multiple companies when hosting infrastructure is shared (like Cloudflare Workers, for example). In addition, IP addresses are prone to change as underlying infrastructure changes, leading services to use ad-hoc sharing mechanisms like CIDR lists. 

3. You go to every website and share a secret, like a Bearer token. This is impractical at scale because it requires developers to maintain separate tokens for each website their bot will visit.

We can do better! Instead of these arduous methods, we’re proposing that developers of bots and agents cryptographically sign requests originating from their service. When protecting origins, reverse proxies such as Cloudflare can then validate those signatures to confidently identify the request source on behalf of site owners, allowing them to take action as they see fit. 

A typical system has three actors:

• User: the entity that wants to perform some actions on the web. This may be a human, an automated program, or anything taking action to retrieve information from the web.

• Agent: an orchestrated browser or software program. For example, Chrome on your computer, or OpenAI’s Operator with ChatGPT. Agents can interact with the web according to web standards (HTML rendering, JavaScript, subrequests, etc.).

• Origin: the website hosting a resource. The user wants to access it through the browser. This is Cloudflare when your website is using our services, and it’s your own server(s) when exposed directly to the Internet.

In the next section, we’ll dive into HTTP Message Signatures and request mTLS, two mechanisms a browser agent may implement to sign outgoing requests, with different levels of ease for an origin to adopt. 

HTTP Message Signatures is a standard that defines the cryptographic authentication of a request sender. It’s essentially a cryptographically sound way to say, “hey, it’s me!”. It’s not the only way that developers can sign requests from their infrastructure — for example, AWS has used Signature v4, and Stripe has a framework for authenticating webhooks — but Message Signatures is a published standard, and the cleanest, most developer-friendly way to sign requests.  

We’re working closely with the wider industry to support these standards-based approaches. For example, OpenAI has started to sign their requests. In their own words:   

“Ensuring the authenticity of Operator traffic is paramount. With HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421), OpenAI signs all Operator requests so site owners can verify they genuinely originate from Operator and haven’t been tampered with” – Eugenio, Engineer, OpenAI

Without further delay, let’s dive in how HTTP Messages Signatures work to identify bot traffic.

Generating a message signature works like this: before sending a request, the agent signs the target origin with a public key. When fetching https://example.com/path/to/resource, it signs example.com. This public key is known to the origin, either because the agent is well known, because it has previously registered, or any other method. Then, the agent writes a Signature-Input header with the following parameters:

1. A validity window (created and expires timestamps)

2. A Key ID that uniquely identifies the key used in the signature. This is a JSON Web Key Thumbprint.  

3. A tag that shows websites the signature’s purpose and validation method, i.e. web-bot-auth for bot authentication.

In addition, the Signature-Agent header indicates where the origin can find the public keys the agent used when signing the request, such as in a directory hosted by signer.example.com. This header is part of the signed content as well.

Here’s an example:

GET /path/to/resource HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Chrome/113.0.0 MyBotCrawler/1.1
Signature-Agent: signer.example.com
Signature-Input: sig=("@authority" "signature-agent");\
             	 created=1700000000;\
             	 expires=1700011111;\
             	 keyid="ba3e64==";\
             	 tag="web-bot-auth"
Signature: sig=abc==

For those building bots, we propose signing the authority of the target URI, i.e. crawler.search.google.com for Google Search, operator.openai.com for OpenAI Operator, workers.dev for Cloudflare Workers, and a way to retrieve the bot public key in the form of signature-agent, if present.

The User-Agent from the example above indicates that the software making the request is Chrome, because it is an agent that uses an orchestrated Chrome to browse the web. You should note that MyBotCrawler/1.1 is still present. The User-Agent header can actually contain multiple products, in decreasing order of importance. If our agent is making requests via Chrome, that’s the most important product and therefore comes first.

At Internet-level scale, these signatures may add a notable amount of overhead to request processing. However, with the right cryptographic suite, and compared to the cost of existing bot mitigation, both technical and social, this seems to be a straightforward tradeoff. This is a metric we will monitor closely, and report on as adoption grows.

We’re making several examples for generating Message Signatures for bots and agents available on Github (though we encourage other implementations!), all of which are standards-compliant, to maximize interoperability. 

Imagine you’re building an agent using a managed Chromium browser, and want to sign all outgoing requests. To achieve this, the webextensions standard provides chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHeaders, where you can modify HTTP headers before they are sent by the browser. The event is triggered before sending any HTTP data, and when headers are available.

Here’s what that code would look like: 

chrome.webRequest.onBeforeSendHeaders.addListener(
  function (details) {
	// Signature and header assignment logic goes here
      // <CODE>
  },
  { urls: ["<all_urls>"] },
  ["blocking", "requestHeaders"] // requires "installation_mode": "force_installed"
);

Cloudflare provides a web-bot-auth helper package on npm that helps you generate request signatures with the correct parameters. onBeforeSendHeaders is a Chrome extension hook that needs to be implemented synchronously. To do so, we import {signatureHeadersSync} from “web-bot-auth”. Once the signature completes, both Signature and Signature-Input headers are assigned. The request flow can then continue.

const request = new URL(details.url);
const created = new Date();
const expired = new Date(created.getTime() + 300_000)


// Perform request signature
const headers = signatureHeadersSync(
  request,
  new Ed25519Signer(jwk),
  { created, expires }
);
// `headers` object now contains `Signature` and `Signature-Input` headers that can be used

This  extension code is available on GitHub, alongside a  debugging server, deployed at https://http-message-signatures-example.research.cloudflare.com. 

Using our debug server, we can now inspect and validate our request signatures from the perspective of the website we’d be visiting. We should now see the Signature and Signature-Input headers:  

^{In this example, the homepage of the debugging server validates the signature from the RFC 9421 Ed25519 verifying key, which the extension uses for signing.}

The above demo and code walkthrough has been fully written in TypeScript: the verification website is on Cloudflare Workers, and the client is a Chrome browser extension. We are cognisant that this does not suit all clients and servers on the web. To demonstrate the proposal works in more environments, we have also implemented bot signature validation in Go with a plugin for Caddy server.

HTTP is not the only way to convey signatures. For instance, one mechanism that has been used in the past to authenticate automated traffic against secured endpoints is mTLS, the “mutual” presentation of TLS certificates. As described in our knowledge base:

Mutual TLS, or mTLS for short, is a method for mutual authentication. mTLS ensures that the parties at each end of a network connection are who they claim to be by verifying that they both have the correct private key. The information within their respective TLS certificates provides additional verification.

While mTLS seems like a good fit for bot authentication on the web, it has limitations. If a user is asked for authentication via the mTLS protocol but does not have a certificate to provide, they would get an inscrutable and unskippable error. Origin sites need a way to conditionally signal to clients that they accept or require mTLS authentication, so that only mTLS-enabled clients use it.

TLS flags are an efficient way to describe whether a feature, like mTLS, is supported by origin sites. Within the IETF, we have proposed a new TLS flag called req mTLS to be sent by the client during the establishment of a connection that signals support for authentication via a client certificate. 

This proposal leverages the tls-flags proposal under discussion in the IETF. The TLS Flags draft allows clients and servers to send an array of one bit flags to each other, rather than creating a new extension (with its associated overhead) for each piece of information they want to share. This is one of the first uses of this extension, and we hope that by using it here we can help drive adoption.

When a client sends the req mTLS flag to the server, they signal to the server that they are able to respond with a certificate if requested. The server can then safely request a certificate without risk of blocking ordinary user traffic, because ordinary users will never set this flag. 

Let’s take a look at what an example of such a req mTLS would look like in Wireshark, a network protocol analyser. You can follow along in the packet capture here.

Extension: req mTLS (len=12)
	Type: req mTLS (65025)
	Length: 12
	Data: 0b0000000000000000000001

The extension number is 65025, or 0xfe01. This corresponds to an unassigned block of TLS extensions that can be used to experiment with TLS Flags. Once the standard is adopted and published by the IETF, the number would be fixed. To use the req mTLS flag the client needs to set the 80^th bit to true, so with our block length of 12 bytes, it should  contain the data 0b0000000000000000000001, which is the case here. The server then responds with a certificate request, and the request follows its course.

Code for this section is available in GitHub under cloudflareresearch/req-mtls

Because mutual TLS is widely supported in TLS libraries already, the parts we need to introduce to the client and server are:

1. Sending/parsing of TLS-flags

2. Specific support for the req mTLS flag

To the best of our knowledge, there is no public implementation of either scheme. Using it for bot authentication may provide a motivation to do so.

Using our experimental fork of Go, a TLS client could support req mTLS as follows:

config := &tls.Config{
    	TLSFlagsSupported:  []tls.TLSFlag{0x50},
    	RootCAs:       	rootPool,
    	Certificates:  	certs,
    	NextProtos:    	[]string{"h2"},
}
trans := http.Transport{TLSClientConfig: config, ForceAttemptHTTP2: true}

This example library allows you to configure Go to send req mTLS 0xfe01 bytes in the TLS Flags extension. If you’d like to test your implementation out, you can prompt your client for certificates against req-mtls.research.cloudflare.com using the Cloudflare Research client cloudflareresearch/req-mtls. For clients, once they set the TLS Flags associated with req mTLS, they are done. The code section taking care of normal mTLS will take over at that point, with no need to implement something new.

We believe that developers of agents and bots should have a public, standard way to authenticate themselves to CDNs and website hosting platforms, regardless of the technology they use or provider they choose. At a high level, both HTTP Message Signatures and request mTLS achieve a similar goal: they allow the owner of a service to authentically identify themselves to a website. That’s why we’re participating in the standardizing effort for both of these protocols at the IETF, where many other authentication mechanisms we’ve discussed here — from TLS to OAuth Bearer tokens –— been developed by diverse sets of stakeholders and standardized as RFCs.   

Evaluating both proposals against each other, we’re prioritizing HTTP Message Signatures for Bots because it relies on the previously adopted RFC 9421 with several reference implementations, and works at the HTTP layer, making adoption simpler. request mTLS may be a better fit for site owners with concerns about the additional bandwidth, but TLS Flags has fewer implementations, is still waiting for IETF adoption, and upgrading the TLS stack has proven to be more challenging than with HTTP. Both approaches share similar discovery and key management concerns, as highlighted in a glossary draft at the IETF. We’re actively exploring both options, and would love to hear from both site owners and bot developers about how you’re evaluating their respective tradeoffs.

In conclusion, we think request signatures and mTLS are promising mechanisms for bot owners and developers of AI agents to authenticate themselves in a tamper-proof manner, forging a path forward that doesn’t rely on ever-changing IP address ranges or spoofable headers such as User-Agent. This authentication can be consumed by Cloudflare when acting as a reverse proxy, or directly by site owners on their own infrastructure. This means that as a bot owner, you can now go to content creators and discuss crawling agreements, with as much granularity as the number of bots you have. You can start implementing these solutions today and test them against the research websites we’ve provided in this post.

Bot authentication also empowers site owners small and large to have more control over the traffic they allow, empowering them to continue to serve content on the public Internet while monitoring automated requests. Longer term, we will integrate these authentication mechanisms into our AI Audit and Bot Management products, to provide better visibility into the bots and agents that are willing to identify themselves.

Being able to solve problems for both origins and clients is key to helping build a better Internet, and we think identification of automated traffic is a step towards that. If you want us to start verifying your message signatures or client certificates, have a compelling use case you’d like us to consider, or any questions, please reach out.