Tag Archives: CAPTCHA

Building secure websites: a guide to Cloudflare Pages and Turnstile Plugin

Post Syndicated from Sally Lee original https://blog.cloudflare.com/guide-to-cloudflare-pages-and-turnstile-plugin


Balancing developer velocity and security against bots is a constant challenge. Deploying your changes as quickly and easily as possible is essential to stay ahead of your (or your customers’) needs and wants. Ensuring your website is safe from malicious bots — without degrading user experience with alien hieroglyphics to decipher just to prove that you are a human — is no small feat. With Pages and Turnstile, we’ll walk you through just how easy it is to have the best of both worlds!

Cloudflare Pages offer a seamless platform for deploying and scaling your websites with ease. You can get started right away with configuring your websites with a quick integration using your git provider, and get set up with unlimited requests, bandwidth, collaborators, and projects.

Cloudflare Turnstile is Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA alternative solution where your users don’t ever have to solve another puzzle to get to your website, no more stop lights and fire hydrants. You can protect your site without having to put your users through an annoying user experience. If you are already using another CAPTCHA service, we have made it easy for you to migrate over to Turnstile with minimal effort needed. Check out the Turnstile documentation to get started.

Alright, what are we building?

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through integrating Cloudflare Pages with Turnstile to secure your website against bots. You’ll learn how to deploy Pages, embed the Turnstile widget, validate the token on the server side, and monitor Turnstile analytics. Let’s build upon this tutorial from Cloudflare’s developer docs, which outlines how to create an HTML form with Pages and Functions. We’ll also show you how to secure it by integrating with Turnstile, complete with client-side rendering and server-side validation, using the Turnstile Pages Plugin!

Step 1: Deploy your Pages

On the Cloudflare Dashboard, select your account and go to Workers & Pages to create a new Pages application with your git provider. Choose the repository where you cloned the tutorial project or any other repository that you want to use for this walkthrough.

The Build settings for this project is simple:

  • Framework preset: None
  • Build command: npm install @cloudflare/pages-plugin-turnstile
  • Build output directory: public

Once you select “Save and Deploy”, all the magic happens under the hood and voilà! The form is already deployed.

Step 2: Embed Turnstile widget

Now, let’s navigate to Turnstile and add the newly created Pages site.

Here are the widget configuration options:

  • Domain: All you need to do is add the domain for the Pages application. In this example, it’s “pages-turnstile-demo.pages.dev”. For each deployment, Pages generates a deployment specific preview subdomain. Turnstile covers all subdomains automatically, so your Turnstile widget will work as expected even in your previews. This is covered more extensively in our Turnstile domain management documentation.
  • Widget Mode: There are three types of widget modes you can choose from.
  • Managed: This is the recommended option where Cloudflare will decide when further validation through the checkbox interaction is required to confirm whether the user is a human or a bot. This is the mode we will be using in this tutorial.
  • Non-interactive: This mode does not require the user to interact and check the box of the widget. It is a non-intrusive mode where the widget is still visible to users but requires no added step in the user experience.
  • Invisible: Invisible mode is where the widget is not visible at all to users and runs in the background of your website.
  • Pre-Clearance setting: With a clearance cookie issued by the Turnstile widget, you can configure your website to verify every single request or once within a session. To learn more about implementing pre-clearance, check out this blog post.

Once you create your widget, you will be given a sitekey and a secret key. The sitekey is public and used to invoke the Turnstile widget on your site. The secret key should be stored safely for security purposes.

Let’s embed the widget above the Submit button. Your index.html should look like this:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
	<head>
		<meta charset="utf8">
		<title>Cloudflare Pages | Form Demo</title>
		<meta name="theme-color" content="#d86300">
		<meta name="mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">
		<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">
		<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">
		<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://www.cloudflare.com/favicon-128.png">
		<link rel="stylesheet" href="/index.css">
		<script src="https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/api.js?onload=_turnstileCb" defer></script>
	</head>
	<body>

		<main>
			<h1>Demo: Form Submission</h1>

			<blockquote>
				<p>This is a demonstration of Cloudflare Pages with Turnstile.</p>
				<p>Pages deployed a <code>/public</code> directory, containing a HTML document (this webpage) and a <code>/functions</code> directory, which contains the Cloudflare Workers code for the API endpoint this <code>&lt;form&gt;</code> references.</p>
				<p><b>NOTE:</b> On form submission, the API endpoint responds with a JSON representation of the data. There is no JavaScript running in this example.</p>
			</blockquote>

			<form method="POST" action="/api/submit">
				<div class="input">
					<label for="name">Full Name</label>
					<input id="name" name="name" type="text" />
				</div>

				<div class="input">
					<label for="email">Email Address</label>
					<input id="email" name="email" type="email" />
				</div>

				<div class="input">
					<label for="referers">How did you hear about us?</label>
					<select id="referers" name="referers">
						<option hidden disabled selected value></option>
						<option value="Facebook">Facebook</option>
						<option value="Twitter">Twitter</option>
						<option value="Google">Google</option>
						<option value="Bing">Bing</option>
						<option value="Friends">Friends</option>
					</select>
				</div>

				<div class="checklist">
					<label>What are your favorite movies?</label>
					<ul>
						<li>
							<input id="m1" type="checkbox" name="movies" value="Space Jam" />
							<label for="m1">Space Jam</label>
						</li>
						<li>
							<input id="m2" type="checkbox" name="movies" value="Little Rascals" />
							<label for="m2">Little Rascals</label>
						</li>
						<li>
							<input id="m3" type="checkbox" name="movies" value="Frozen" />
							<label for="m3">Frozen</label>
						</li>
						<li>
							<input id="m4" type="checkbox" name="movies" value="Home Alone" />
							<label for="m4">Home Alone</label>
						</li>
					</ul>
				</div>
				<div id="turnstile-widget" style="padding-top: 20px;"></div>
				<button type="submit">Submit</button>
			</form>
		</main>
	<script>
	// This function is called when the Turnstile script is loaded and ready to be used.
	// The function name matches the "onload=..." parameter.
	function _turnstileCb() {
	    console.debug('_turnstileCb called');

	    turnstile.render('#turnstile-widget', {
	      sitekey: '0xAAAAAAAAAXAAAAAAAAAAAA',
	      theme: 'light',
	    });
	}
	</script>
	</body>
</html>

You can embed the Turnstile widget implicitly or explicitly. In this tutorial, we will explicitly embed the widget by injecting the JavaScript tag and related code, then specifying the placement of the widget.

<script src="https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/api.js?onload=_turnstileCb" defer></script>
<script>
	function _turnstileCb() {
	    console.debug('_turnstileCb called');

	    turnstile.render('#turnstile-widget', {
	      sitekey: '0xAAAAAAAAAXAAAAAAAAAAAA',
	      theme: 'light',
	    });
	}
</script>

Make sure that the div id you assign is the same as the id you specify in turnstile.render call. In this case, let’s use “turnstile-widget”. Once that’s done, you should see the widget show up on your site!

<div id="turnstile-widget" style="padding-top: 20px;"></div>

Step 3: Validate the token

Now that the Turnstile widget is rendered on the front end, let’s validate it on the server side and check out the Turnstile outcome. We need to make a call to the /siteverify API with the token in the submit function under ./functions/api/submit.js.

First, grab the token issued from Turnstile under cf-turnstile-response. Then, call the /siteverify API to ensure that the token is valid. In this tutorial, we’ll attach the Turnstile outcome to the response to verify everything is working well. You can decide on the expected behavior and where to direct the user based on the /siteverify response.

/**
 * POST /api/submit
 */

import turnstilePlugin from "@cloudflare/pages-plugin-turnstile";

// This is a demo secret key. In prod, we recommend you store
// your secret key(s) safely. 
const SECRET_KEY = '0x4AAAAAAASh4E5cwHGsTTePnwcPbnFru6Y';

export const onRequestPost = [
    turnstilePlugin({
    	secret: SECRET_KEY,
    }),
    (async (context) => {
    	// Request has been validated as coming from a human
    	const formData = await context.request.formData()

    	var tmp, outcome = {};
	for (let [key, value] of formData) {
		tmp = outcome[key];
		if (tmp === undefined) {
			outcome[key] = value;
		} else {
			outcome[key] = [].concat(tmp, value);
		}
	}

	// Attach Turnstile outcome to the response
	outcome["turnstile_outcome"] = context.data.turnstile;

	let pretty = JSON.stringify(outcome, null, 2);

      	return new Response(pretty, {
      		headers: {
      			'Content-Type': 'application/json;charset=utf-8'
      		}
      	});
    })
];

Since Turnstile accurately decided that the visitor was not a bot, the response for “success” is “true” and “interactive” is “false”. The “interactive” being “false” means that the checkbox was automatically checked by Cloudflare as the visitor was determined to be human. The user was seamlessly allowed access to the website without having to perform any additional actions. If the visitor looks suspicious, Turnstile will become interactive, requiring the visitor to actually click the checkbox to verify that they are not a bot. We used the managed mode in this tutorial but depending on your application logic, you can choose the widget mode that works best for you.

{
  "name": "Sally Lee",
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "referers": "Facebook",
  "movies": "Space Jam",
  "cf-turnstile-response": "0._OHpi7JVN7Xz4abJHo9xnK9JNlxKljOp51vKTjoOi6NR4ru_4MLWgmxt1rf75VxRO4_aesvBvYj8bgGxPyEttR1K2qbUdOiONJUd5HzgYEaD_x8fPYVU6uZPUCdWpM4FTFcxPAnqhTGBVdYshMEycXCVBqqLVdwSvY7Me-VJoge7QOStLOtGgQ9FaY4NVQK782mpPfgVujriDAEl4s5HSuVXmoladQlhQEK21KkWtA1B6603wQjlLkog9WqQc0_3QMiBZzZVnFsvh_NLDtOXykOFK2cba1mLLcADIZyhAho0mtmVD6YJFPd-q9iQFRCMmT2Sz00IToXz8cXBGYluKtxjJrq7uXsRrI5pUUThKgGKoHCGTd_ufuLDjDCUE367h5DhJkeMD9UsvQgr1MhH3TPUKP9coLVQxFY89X9t8RAhnzCLNeCRvj2g-GNVs4-MUYPomd9NOcEmSpklYwCgLQ.jyBeKkV_MS2YkK0ZRjUkMg.6845886eb30b58f15de056eeca6afab8110e3123aeb1c0d1abef21c4dd4a54a1",
  "turnstile_outcome": {
    "success": true,
    "error-codes": [],
    "challenge_ts": "2024-02-28T22:52:30.009Z",
    "hostname": "pages-turnstile-demo.pages.dev",
    "action": "",
    "cdata": "",
    "metadata": {
      "interactive": false
    }
  }
}

Wrapping up

Now that we’ve set up Turnstile, we can head to Turnstile analytics in the Cloudflare Dashboard to monitor the solve rate and widget traffic. Visitor Solve Rate indicates the percentage of visitors who successfully completed the Turnstile widget. A sudden drop in the Visitor Solve Rate could indicate an increase in bot traffic, as bots may fail to complete the challenge presented by the widget. API Solve Rate measures the percentage of visitors who successfully validated their token against the /siteverify API. Similar to the Visitor Solve Rate, a significant drop in the API Solve Rate may indicate an increase in bot activity, as bots may fail to validate their tokens. Widget Traffic provides insights into the nature of the traffic hitting your website. A high number of challenges requiring interaction may suggest that bots are attempting to access your site, while a high number of unsolved challenges could indicate that the Turnstile widget is effectively blocking suspicious traffic.

And that’s it! We’ve walked you through how to easily secure your Pages with Turnstile. Pages and Turnstile are currently available for free for every Cloudflare user to get started right away. If you are looking for a seamless and speedy developer experience to get a secure website up and running, protected by Turnstile, head over to the Cloudflare Dashboard today!

Integrating Turnstile with the Cloudflare WAF to challenge fetch requests

Post Syndicated from Adam Martinetti http://blog.cloudflare.com/author/adam-martinetti/ original https://blog.cloudflare.com/integrating-turnstile-with-the-cloudflare-waf-to-challenge-fetch-requests


Two months ago, we made Cloudflare Turnstile generally available — giving website owners everywhere an easy way to fend off bots, without ever issuing a CAPTCHA. Turnstile allows any website owner to embed a frustration-free Cloudflare challenge on their website with a simple code snippet, making it easy to help ensure that only human traffic makes it through. In addition to protecting a website’s frontend, Turnstile also empowers web administrators to harden browser-initiated (AJAX) API calls running under the hood. These APIs are commonly used by dynamic single-page web apps, like those created with React, Angular, Vue.js.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we have integrated Turnstile with the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF). This means that web admins can add the Turnstile code snippet to their websites, and then configure the Cloudflare WAF to manage these requests. This is completely customizable using WAF Rules; for instance, you can allow a user authenticated by Turnstile to interact with all of an application’s API endpoints without facing any further challenges, or you can configure certain sensitive endpoints, like Login, to always issue a challenge.

Challenging fetch requests in the Cloudflare WAF

Millions of websites protected by Cloudflare’s WAF leverage our JS Challenge, Managed Challenge, and Interactive Challenge to stop bots while letting humans through. For each of these challenges, Cloudflare intercepts the matching request and responds with an HTML page rendered by the browser, where the user completes a basic task to demonstrate that they’re human. When a user successfully completes a challenge, they receive a cf_clearance cookie, which tells Cloudflare that a user has successfully passed a challenge, the type of challenge, and when it was completed. A clearance cookie can’t be shared between users, and is only valid for the time set by the Cloudflare customer in their Security Settings dashboard.

This process works well, except when a browser receives a challenge on a fetch request and the browser has not previously passed a challenge. On a fetch request, or an XML HTTP Request (XHR), the browser expects to get back simple text (in JSON or XML formats) and cannot render the HTML necessary to run a challenge.

As an example, let’s imagine a pizzeria owner who built an online ordering form in React with a payment page that submits data to an API endpoint that processes payments. When a user views the web form to add their credit card details they can pass a Managed Challenge, but when the user submits their credit card details by making a fetch request, the browser won’t execute the code necessary for a challenge to run. The pizzeria owner’s only option for handling suspicious (but potentially legitimate) requests is to block them, which runs the risk of false positives that could cause the restaurant to lose a sale.

This is where Turnstile can help. Turnstile allows anyone on the Internet to embed a Cloudflare challenge anywhere on their website. Before today, the output of Turnstile was only a one-time use token. To enable customers to issue challenges for these fetch requests, Turnstile can now issue a clearance cookie for the domain that it’s embedded on. Customers can issue their challenge within the HTML page before a fetch request, pre-clearing the visitor to interact with the Payment API.

Turnstile Pre-Clearance mode

Returning to our pizzeria example, the three big advantages of using Pre-Clearance to integrate Turnstile with the Cloudflare WAF are:

  1. Improved user experience: Turnstile’s embedded challenge can run in the background while the visitor is entering their payment details.
  2. Blocking more requests at the edge: Because Turnstile now issues a clearance cookie for the domain that it’s embedded on, our pizzeria owner can use a Custom Rule to issue a Managed Challenge for every request to the payment API. This ensures that automated attacks attempting to target the payment API directly are stopped by Cloudflare before they can reach the API.
  3. (Optional) Securing the action and the user: No backend code changes are necessary to get the benefit of Pre-Clearance. However, further Turnstile integration will increase security for the integrated API. The pizzeria owner can adjust their payment form to validate the received Turnstile token, ensuring that every payment attempt is individually validated by Turnstile to protect their payment endpoint from session hijacking.

A Turnstile widget with Pre-Clearance enabled will still issue turnstile tokens, which gives customers the flexibility to decide if an endpoint is critical enough to require a security check on every request to it, or just once a session. Clearance cookies issued by a Turnstile widget are automatically applied to the Cloudflare zone the Turnstile widget is embedded on, with no configuration necessary. The clearance time the token is valid for is still controlled by the zone specific “Challenge Passage” time.

Implementing Turnstile with Pre-Clearance

Let’s make this concrete by walking through a basic implementation. Before we start, we’ve set up a simple demo application where we emulate a frontend talking to a backend on a /your-api endpoint.

To this end, we have the following code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
   <title>Turnstile Pre-Clearance Demo </title>
</head>
<body>
  <main class="pre-clearance-demo">
    <h2>Pre-clearance Demo</h2>
    <button id="fetchBtn">Fetch Data</button>
    <div id="response"></div>
</main>


<script>
  const button = document.getElementById('fetchBtn');
  const responseDiv = document.getElementById('response');
  button.addEventListener('click', async () => {
  try {
    let result = await fetch('/your-api');
    if (result.ok) {
      let data = await result.json();
      responseDiv.textContent = JSON.stringify(data);
    } else {
      responseDiv.textContent = 'Error fetching data';
    }
  } catch (error) {
    responseDiv.textContent = 'Network error';
  }
});
</script>

We’ve created a button. Upon clicking, Cloudflare makes a fetch() request to the /your-api endpoint, showing the result in the response container.

Now let’s consider that we have a Cloudflare WAF rule set up that protects the /your-api endpoint with a Managed Challenge.

Due to this rule, the app that we just wrote is going to fail for the reason described earlier (the browser is expecting a JSON response, but instead receives the challenge page as HTML).

If we inspect the Network Tab, we can see that the request to /your-api has been given a 403 response.

Upon inspection, the Cf-Mitigated header shows that the response was challenged by Cloudflare’s firewall, as the visitor has not solved a challenge before.

To address this problem in our app, we set up a Turnstile Widget in Pre-Clearance mode for the Turnstile sitekey that we want to use.

In our application, we override the fetch() function to invoke Turnstile once a Cf-Mitigated response has been received.

<script>
turnstileLoad = function () {
  // Save a reference to the original fetch function
  const originalFetch = window.fetch;

  // A simple modal to contain Cloudflare Turnstile
  const overlay = document.createElement('div');
  overlay.style.position = 'fixed';
  overlay.style.top = '0';
  overlay.style.left = '0';
  overlay.style.right = '0';
  overlay.style.bottom = '0';
  overlay.style.backgroundColor = 'rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7)';
  overlay.style.border = '1px solid grey';
  overlay.style.zIndex = '10000';
  overlay.style.display = 'none';
  overlay.innerHTML =       '<p style="color: white; text-align: center; margin-top: 50vh;">One more step before you proceed...</p><div style=”display: flex; flex-wrap: nowrap; align-items: center; justify-content: center;” id="turnstile_widget"></div>';
  document.body.appendChild(overlay);

  // Override the native fetch function
  window.fetch = async function (...args) {
      let response = await originalFetch(...args);

      //If the original request was challenged...
      if (response.headers.has('cf-mitigated') && response.headers.get('cf-mitigated') === 'challenge') {
          //The request has been challenged...
          overlay.style.display = 'block';

          await new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
              turnstile.render('#turnstile_widget', {
                  'sitekey': ‘YOUR_TURNSTILE_SITEKEY',
                  'error-callback': function (e) {
                      overlay.style.display = 'none';
                      reject(e);
                  },
                  'callback': function (token, preClearanceObtained) {
                      if (preClearanceObtained) {
                          //The visitor successfully solved the challenge on the page. 
                          overlay.style.display = 'none';
                          resolve();
                      } else {
                          reject(e);
                      }
                  },
              });
          });

          // Replay the original fetch request, this time it will have the cf_clearance Cookie
          response = await originalFetch(...args);
      }
      return response;
  };
};
</script>
<script src="https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/api.js?onload=turnstileLoad" async defer></script>

There is a lot going on in the snippet above: First, we create a hidden overlay element and override the browser’s fetch() function. The fetch() function is changed to introspect the Cf-Mitigated header for ‘challenge’. If a challenge is issued, the initial result will be unsuccessful; instead, a Turnstile overlay (with Pre-Clearance enabled) will appear in our web application. Once the Turnstile challenge has been completed we will retry the previous request after Turnstile has obtained the cf_clearance cookie to get through the Cloudflare WAF.

Upon solving the Turnstile widget, the overlay disappears, and the requested API result is shown successfully:

Pre-Clearance is available to all Cloudflare customers

Every Cloudflare user with a free plan or above can use Turnstile in managed mode free for an unlimited number of requests. If you’re a Cloudflare user looking to improve your security and user experience for your critical API endpoints, head over to our dashboard and create a Turnstile widget with Pre-Clearance today.

Birthday Week recap: everything we announced — plus an AI-powered opportunity for startups

Post Syndicated from Dina Kozlov original http://blog.cloudflare.com/birthday-week-2023-wrap-up/

Birthday Week recap: everything we announced — plus an AI-powered opportunity for startups

Birthday Week recap: everything we announced — plus an AI-powered opportunity for startups

This year, Cloudflare officially became a teenager, turning 13 years old. We celebrated this milestone with a series of announcements that benefit both our customers and the Internet community.

From developing applications in the age of AI to securing against the most advanced attacks that are yet to come, Cloudflare is proud to provide the tools that help our customers stay one step ahead.

We hope you’ve had a great time following along and for anyone looking for a recap of everything we launched this week, here it is:

Monday

What

In a sentence…

Switching to Cloudflare can cut emissions by up to 96%

Switching enterprise network services from on-prem to Cloudflare can cut related carbon emissions by up to 96%. 

Cloudflare Trace

Use Cloudflare Trace to see which rules and settings are invoked when an HTTP request for your site goes through our network. 

Cloudflare Fonts

Introducing Cloudflare Fonts. Enhance privacy and performance for websites using Google Fonts by loading fonts directly from the Cloudflare network. 

How Cloudflare intelligently routes traffic

Technical deep dive that explains how Cloudflare uses machine learning to intelligently route traffic through our vast network. 

Low Latency Live Streaming

Cloudflare Stream’s LL-HLS support is now in open beta. You can deliver video to your audience faster, reducing the latency a viewer may experience on their player to as little as 3 seconds. 

Account permissions for all

Cloudflare account permissions are now available to all customers, not just Enterprise. In addition, we’ll show you how you can use them and best practices. 

Incident Alerts

Customers can subscribe to Cloudflare Incident Alerts and choose when to get notified based on affected products and level of impact. 

Tuesday

What

In a sentence…

Welcome to the connectivity cloud

Cloudflare is the world’s first connectivity cloud — the modern way to connect and protect your cloud, networks, applications and users. 

Amazon’s $2bn IPv4 tax — and how you can avoid paying it 

Amazon will begin taxing their customers $43 for IPv4 addresses, so Cloudflare will give those \$43 back in the form of credits to bypass that tax. 

Sippy

Minimize egress fees by using Sippy to incrementally migrate your data from AWS to R2. 

Cloudflare Images

All Image Resizing features will be available under Cloudflare Images and we’re simplifying pricing to make it more predictable and reliable.  

Traffic anomalies and notifications with Cloudflare Radar

Cloudflare Radar will be publishing anomalous traffic events for countries and Autonomous Systems (ASes).

Detecting Internet outages

Deep dive into how Cloudflare detects Internet outages, the challenges that come with it, and our approach to overcome these problems. 

Wednesday

What

In a sentence…

The best place on Region: Earth for inference

Now available: Workers AI, a serverless GPU cloud for AI, Vectorize so you can build your own vector databases, and AI Gateway to help manage costs and observability of your AI applications. 

Cloudflare delivers the best infrastructure for next-gen AI applications, supported by partnerships with NVIDIA, Microsoft, Hugging Face, Databricks, and Meta.

Workers AI 

Launching Workers AI — AI inference as a service platform, empowering developers to run AI models with just a few lines of code, all powered by our global network of GPUs. 

Partnering with Hugging Face 

Cloudflare is partnering with Hugging Face to make AI models more accessible and affordable to users. 

Vectorize

Cloudflare’s vector database, designed to allow engineers to build full-stack, AI-powered applications entirely on Cloudflare's global network — available in Beta. 

AI Gateway

AI Gateway helps developers have greater control and visibility in their AI apps, so that you can focus on building without worrying about observability, reliability, and scaling. AI Gateway handles the things that nearly all AI applications need, saving you engineering time so you can focus on what you're building.

 

You can now use WebGPU in Cloudflare Workers

Developers can now use WebGPU in Cloudflare Workers. Learn more about why WebGPUs are important, why we’re offering them to customers, and what’s next. 

What AI companies are building with Cloudflare

Many AI companies are using Cloudflare to build next generation applications. Learn more about what they’re building and how Cloudflare is helping them on their journey. 

Writing poems using LLama 2 on Workers AI

Want to write a poem using AI? Learn how to run your own AI chatbot in 14 lines of code, running on Cloudflare’s global network. 

Thursday

What

In a sentence…

Hyperdrive

Cloudflare launches a new product, Hyperdrive, that makes existing regional databases much faster by dramatically speeding up queries that are made from Cloudflare Workers.

D1 Open Beta

D1 is now in open beta, and the theme is “scale”: with higher per-database storage limits and the ability to create more databases, we’re unlocking the ability for developers to build production-scale applications on D1.

Pages Build Caching

Build cache is a feature designed to reduce your build times by caching and reusing previously computed project components — now available in Beta. 

Running serverless Puppeteer with Workers and Durable Objects

Introducing the Browser Rendering API, which enables developers to utilize the Puppeteer browser automation library within Workers, eliminating the need for serverless browser automation system setup and maintenance

Cloudflare partners with Microsoft to power their Edge Secure Network

We partnered with Microsoft Edge to provide a fast and secure VPN, right in the browser. Users don’t have to install anything new or understand complex concepts to get the latest in network-level privacy: Edge Secure Network VPN is available on the latest consumer version of Microsoft Edge in most markets, and automatically comes with 5GB of data. 

Re-introducing the Cloudflare Workers playground

We are revamping the playground that demonstrates the power of Workers, along with new development tooling, and the ability to share your playground code and deploy instantly to Cloudflare’s global network

Cloudflare integrations marketplace expands

Introducing the newest additions to Cloudflare’s Integration Marketplace. Now available: Sentry, Momento and Turso. 

A Socket API that works across Javascript runtimes — announcing WinterCG spec and polyfill for connect()

Engineers from Cloudflare and Vercel have published a draft specification of the connect() sockets API for review by the community, along with a Node.js compatible polyfill for the connect() API that developers can start using.

New Workers pricing

Announcing new pricing for Cloudflare Workers, where you are billed based on CPU time, and never for the idle time that your Worker spends waiting on network requests and other I/O.

Friday

What

In a sentence…

Post Quantum Cryptography goes GA 

Cloudflare is rolling out post-quantum cryptography support to customers, services, and internal systems to proactively protect against advanced attacks. 

Encrypted Client Hello

Announcing a contribution that helps improve privacy for everyone on the Internet. Encrypted Client Hello, a new standard that prevents networks from snooping on which websites a user is visiting, is now available on all Cloudflare plans. 

Email Retro Scan 

Cloudflare customers can now scan messages within their Office 365 Inboxes for threats. The Retro Scan will let you look back seven days to see what threats your current email security tool has missed. 

Turnstile is Generally Available

Turnstile, Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement, is now generally available and available for free to everyone and includes unlimited use. 

AI crawler bots

Any Cloudflare user, on any plan, can choose specific categories of bots that they want to allow or block, including AI crawlers. We are also recommending a new standard to robots.txt that will make it easier for websites to clearly direct how AI bots can and can’t crawl.

Detecting zero-days before zero-day

Deep dive into Cloudflare’s approach and ongoing research into detecting novel web attack vectors in our WAF before they are seen by a security researcher. 

Privacy Preserving Metrics

Deep dive into the fundamental concepts behind the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) protocol with examples on how we’ve implemented it into Daphne, our open source aggregator server. 

Post-quantum cryptography to origin

We are rolling out post-quantum cryptography support for outbound connections to origins and Cloudflare Workers fetch() calls. Learn more about what we enabled, how we rolled it out in a safe manner, and how you can add support to your origin server today. 

Network performance update

Cloudflare’s updated benchmark results regarding network performance plus a dive into the tools and processes that we use to monitor and improve our network performance. 

One More Thing

Birthday Week recap: everything we announced — plus an AI-powered opportunity for startups

When Cloudflare turned 12 last year, we announced the Workers Launchpad Funding Program – you can think of it like a startup accelerator program for companies building on Cloudlare’s Developer Platform, with no restrictions on your size, stage, or geography.

A refresher on how the Launchpad works: Each quarter, we admit a group of startups who then get access to a wide range of technical advice, mentorship, and fundraising opportunities. That includes our Founders Bootcamp, Open Office Hours with our Solution Architects, and Demo Day. Those who are ready to fundraise will also be connected to our community of 40+ leading global Venture Capital firms.

In exchange, we just ask for your honest feedback. We want to know what works, what doesn’t and what you need us to build for you. We don’t ask for a stake in your company, and we don’t ask you to pay to be a part of the program.


Over the past year, we’ve received applications from nearly 60 different countries. We’ve had a chance to work closely with 50 amazing early and growth-stage startups admitted into the first two cohorts, and have grown our VC partner community to 40+ firms and more than $2 billion in potential investments in startups building on Cloudflare.

Next up: Cohort #3! Between recently wrapping up Cohort #2 (check out their Demo Day!), celebrating the Launchpad’s 1st birthday, and the heaps of announcements we made last week, we thought that everyone could use a little extra time to catch up on all the news – which is why we are extending the deadline for Cohort #3 a few weeks to October 13, 2023. AND we’re reserving 5 spots in the class for those who are already using any of last Wednesday’s AI announcements. Just be sure to mention what you’re using in your application.

So once you’ve had a chance to check out the announcements and pour yourself a cup of coffee, check out the Workers Launchpad. Applying is a breeze — you’ll be done long before your coffee gets cold.

Until next time

That’s all for Birthday Week 2023. We hope you enjoyed the ride, and we’ll see you at our next innovation week!


Cloudflare is free of CAPTCHAs; Turnstile is free for everyone

Post Syndicated from Benedikt Wolters original http://blog.cloudflare.com/turnstile-ga/

Cloudflare is free of CAPTCHAs; Turnstile is free for everyone

Cloudflare is free of CAPTCHAs; Turnstile is free for everyone

For years, we’ve written that CAPTCHAs drive us crazy. Humans give up on CAPTCHA puzzles approximately 15% of the time and, maddeningly, CAPTCHAs are significantly easier for bots to solve than they are for humans. We’ve spent the past three and a half years working to build a better experience for humans that’s just as effective at stopping bots. As of this month, we’ve finished replacing every CAPTCHA issued by Cloudflare with Turnstile, our new CAPTCHA replacement (pictured below). Cloudflare will never issue another visual puzzle to anyone, for any reason.

Cloudflare is free of CAPTCHAs; Turnstile is free for everyone

Now that we’ve eliminated CAPTCHAs at Cloudflare, we want to make it easy for anyone to do the same, even if they don’t use other Cloudflare services. We’ve decoupled Turnstile from our platform so that any website operator on any platform can use it just by adding a few lines of code. We’re thrilled to announce that Turnstile is now generally available, and Turnstile’s ‘Managed’ mode is now completely free to everyone for unlimited use.

Easy on humans, hard on bots, private for everyone

Cloudflare is free of CAPTCHAs; Turnstile is free for everyone

There’s a lot that goes into Turnstile’s simple checkbox to ensure that it’s easy for everyone, preserves user privacy, and does its job stopping bots. Part of making challenges better for everyone means that everyone gets the same great experience, no matter what browser you’re using. Because we do not employ a visual puzzle, users with low vision or blindness get the same easy to use challenge flow as everyone else. It was particularly important for us to avoid falling back to audio CAPTCHAs to offer an experience accessible to everyone. Audio CAPTCHAs are often much worse than even visual CAPTCHAs for humans to solve, with only 31.2% of audio challenges resulting in a three-person agreement on what the correct solution actually is. The prevalence of free speech-to-text services has made it easy for bots to solve audio CAPTCHAs as well, with a recent study showing bots can accurately solve audio CAPTCHAs in over 85% of attempts.

We also created Turnstile to be privacy focused. Turnstile meets ePrivacy Directive, GDPR and CCPA compliance requirements, as well as the strict requirements of our own privacy commitments. In addition, Cloudflare's FedRAMP Moderate authorized package, "Cloudflare for Government" now includes Turnstile. We don’t rely on tracking user data, like what other websites someone has visited, to determine if a user is a human or robot. Our business is protecting websites, not selling ads, so operators can deploy Turnstile knowing that their users’ data is safe.

With all of our emphasis on how easy it is to pass a Turnstile challenge, you would be right to ask how it can stop a bot. If a bot can find all images with crosswalks in grainy photos faster than we can, surely it can check a box as well. Bots definitely can check a box, and they can even mimic the erratic path of human mouse movement while doing so. For Turnstile, the actual act of checking a box isn’t important, it’s the background data we’re analyzing while the box is checked that matters. We find and stop bots by running a series of in-browser tests, checking browser characteristics, native browser APIs, and asking the browser to pass lightweight tests (ex: proof-of-work tests, proof-of-space tests) to prove that it’s an actual browser. The current deployment of Turnstile checks billions of visitors every day, and we are able to identify browser abnormalities that bots exhibit while attempting to pass those tests.

For over one year, we used our Managed Challenge to rotate between CAPTCHAs and our own Turnstile challenge to compare our effectiveness. We found that even without asking users for any interactivity at all, Turnstile was just as effective as a CAPTCHA. Once we were sure that the results were effective at coping with the response from bot makers, we replaced the CAPTCHA challenge with our own checkbox solution. We present this extra test when we see potentially suspicious signals, and it helps us provide an even greater layer of security.

Turnstile is great for fighting fraud

Like all sites that offer services for free, Cloudflare sees our fair share of automated account signups, which can include “new account fraud,” where bad actors automate the creation of many different accounts to abuse our platform. To help combat this abuse, we’ve rolled out Turnstile’s invisible mode to protect our own signup page. This month, we’ve blocked over 1 million automated signup attempts using Turnstile, without a reported false positive or any change in our self-service billings that rely on this signup flow.  

Lessons from the Turnstile beta

Cloudflare is free of CAPTCHAs; Turnstile is free for everyone

Over the past twelve months, we’ve been grateful to see how many people are eager to try, then rely on, and integrate Turnstile into their web applications. It’s been rewarding to see the developer community embrace Turnstile as well. We list some of the community created Turnstile integrations here, including integrations with WordPress, Angular, Vue, and a Cloudflare recommended React library. We’ve listened to customer feedback, and added support for 17 new languages, new callbacks, and new error codes.

76,000+ users have signed up, but our biggest single test by far was the Eurovision final vote. Turnstile runs on challenge pages on over 25 million Cloudflare websites. Usually, that makes Cloudflare the far and away biggest Turnstile consumer, until the final Eurovision vote. During that one hour, challenge traffic from the Eurovision voting site outpaced the use of challenge pages on those 25 million sites combined! Turnstile handled the enormous spike in traffic without a hitch.

While a lot went well during the Turnstile beta, we also encountered some opportunities for us to learn. We were initially resistant to disclosing why a Turnstile challenge failed. After all, if bad actors know what we’re looking for, it becomes easier for bots to fool our challenges until we introduce new detections. However, during the Turnstile beta, we saw a few scenarios where legitimate users could not pass a challenge. These scenarios made it clear to us that we need to be transparent about why a challenge failed to help aid any individual who might modify their browser in a way that causes them to get caught by Turnstile. We now publish detailed client-side error codes to surface the reason why a challenge has failed. Two scenarios came up on several occasions that we didn’t expect:

First, we saw that desktop computers at least 10 years old frequently had expired motherboard batteries, and computers with bad motherboard batteries very often keep inaccurate time. This is because without the motherboard battery, a desktop computer’s clock will stop operating when the computer is off. Turnstile checks your computer’s system time to detect when a website operator has accidentally configured a challenge page to be cached, as caching a challenge page will cause it to become impassable. Unfortunately, this same check was unintentionally catching humans who just needed to update the time. When we see this issue, we now surface a clear error message to the end user to update their system time. We’d prefer to never have to surface an error in the first place, so we’re working to develop new ways to check for cached content that won’t impact real people.

Second, we find that a few privacy-focused users often ask their browsers to go beyond standard practices to preserve their anonymity. This includes changing their user-agent (something bots will do to evade detection as well), and preventing third-party scripts from executing entirely. Issues caused by this behavior can now be displayed clearly in a Turnstile widget, so those users can immediately understand the issue and make a conscientious choice about whether they want to allow their browser to pass a challenge.

Although we have some of the most sensitive, thoroughly built monitoring systems at Cloudflare, we did not catch either of these issues on our own. We needed to talk to users affected by the issue to help us understand what the problem was. Going forward, we want to make sure we always have that direct line of communication open. We’re rolling out a new feedback form in the Turnstile widget, to ensure any future corner cases are addressed quickly and with urgency.

Cloudflare is free of CAPTCHAs; Turnstile is free for everyone

Turnstile: GA and Free for Everyone

Announcing Turnstile’s General Availability means that Turnstile is now completely production ready, available for free for unlimited use via our visible widget in Managed mode. Turnstile Enterprise includes SaaS platform support and a visible mode without the Cloudflare logo. Self-serve customers can expect a pay-as-you-go option for advanced features to be available in early 2024. Users can continue to access Turnstile’s advanced features below our 1 million siteverify request limit, as has been the case during the beta. If you’ve been waiting to try Turnstile, head over to our signup page and create an account!

Use AWS WAF CAPTCHA to protect your application against common bot traffic

Post Syndicated from Abhinav Bannerjee original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/use-aws-waf-captcha-to-protect-your-application-against-common-bot-traffic/

In this blog post, you’ll learn how you can use a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) with other AWS WAF controls as part of a layered approach to provide comprehensive protection against bot traffic. We’ll describe a workflow that tracks the number of incoming requests to a site’s store page. The workflow then limits those requests if they exceed a certain threshold. Requests from IP addresses that exceed the threshold will be presented a CAPTCHA challenge to prove that the requests are being made by a human.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers many tools and recommendations that companies can use as they face challenges with bot traffic on their websites. Web applications can be compromised through a variety of vectors, including cross-site scripting, SQL injection, path traversal, local file inclusion, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. AWS WAF offers managed rules that are designed to provide protection against common application vulnerabilities or other unwanted web traffic, without requiring you to write your own rules.

There are some web attacks like web scraping, credential stuffing, and layer 7 DDoS attempts conducted by bots (as well as by humans) that target sensitive areas of your website, such as your store page. A CAPTCHA mitigates undesirable traffic by requiring the visitor to complete challenges before they are allowed to access protected resources. You can implement CAPTCHA to help prevent unwanted activities. Last year, AWS introduced AWS WAF CAPTCHA, which allows customers to set up AWS WAF rules that require CAPTCHA challenges to be completed for common targets such as forms (for example, search forms).

Scenario

Consider an attack where the unauthorized user is attempting to overwhelm a site’s store page by repeatedly sending search requests for different items.

Assume that traffic visits a website that is hosted through Amazon CloudFront and attempts the above behavior on the /store URL. In this scenario, there is a rate-based rule in place that will track the number of requests coming in from each IP. This rate-based rule tracks the rate of requests for each originating IP address and invokes the rule action on IPs with rates that go over the limit. With CAPTCHA implemented as the rule action, excessive attempts to search within a 5-minute window will result in a CAPTCHA challenge being presented to the user. This workflow is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: User visits a store page and is evaluated by a rate-based rule

Figure 1: User visits a store page and is evaluated by a rate-based rule

When a user solves a CAPTCHA challenge, AWS automatically generates and encrypts a token and sends it to the client as a cookie. The client requests aren’t challenged again until the token has expired. AWS WAF calculates token expiration by using the immunity time configuration. You can configure the immunity time in a web access control list (web ACL) CAPTCHA configuration and in the configuration for a rule’s action setting. When a user provides an incorrect answer to a CAPTCHA challenge, the challenge informs the user and loads a new puzzle. When the user solves the challenge, the challenge automatically submits the original web request, updated with the CAPTCHA token from the successful puzzle completion.

Walkthrough

This workflow will require an AWS WAF rule within a new or existing rule group or web ACL. The rule will define how web requests are inspected and the action to take.

To create an AWS WAF rate-based rule

  1. Open the AWS WAF console and in the left navigation pane, choose Web ACLs.
  2. Choose an existing web ACL, or choose Create web ACL at the top right to create a new web ACL.
  3. Under Rules, choose Add rules, and then in the drop-down list, choose Add my own rules and rule groups.
  4. For Rule type, choose Rule builder.
  5. In the Rule builder section, for Name, enter your rule name. For Type, choose Rate-based rule.
  6. In the Request rate details section, enter your rate limit (for example, 100). For IP address to use for rate limiting, choose Source IP address, and for Criteria to count requests toward rate limit, choose Only consider requests that match criteria in a rule statement.
  7. For Count only the requests that match the following statement, choose Matches the statement from the drop-down list.
  8. In the Statement section, for Inspect, choose URI path. For Match type , choose Contains string.
  9. For String to match, enter the URI path of your web page (for example, /store).
  10. In the Action section, choose CAPTCHA.
  11. (Optional) For Immunity time, choose Set a custom immunity time for this rule, or keep the default value (300 seconds).
  12. To finish, choose Add rule, and then choose Save to add the rule to your web ACL.

After you add the rule, go to the Rules tab of your web ACL and navigate to your rule. Confirm that the output resembles what is shown in Figure 2. You should have a rate-based rule with a scope-down statement that matches the store URI path you entered earlier, and the action should be set to CAPTCHA.

The following is the JSON for the CAPTCHA rule that you just created. You can use this to validate your configuration. You can also use this JSON in the rule builder while creating the rule.

{
  "Name": "CaptchaOnRBR",
  "Priority": 0,
  "Statement": {
    "RateBasedStatement": {
      "Limit": 100,
      "AggregateKeyType": "IP",
      "ScopeDownStatement": {
        "ByteMatchStatement": {
          "SearchString": "/store",
          "FieldToMatch": {
            "UriPath": {}
          },
          "TextTransformations": [
            {
              "Priority": 0,
              "Type": "NONE"
            }
          ],
          "PositionalConstraint": "CONTAINS"
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "Action": {
    "Captcha": {}
  },
  "VisibilityConfig": {
    "SampledRequestsEnabled": true,
    "CloudWatchMetricsEnabled": true,
    "MetricName": "CaptchaOnRBR"
  },
  "CaptchaConfig": {
    "ImmunityTimeProperty": {
      "ImmunityTime": 60
    }
  }
}

After you complete this configuration, the rule will be invoked when an IP address unsuccessfully attempts to search the store at a rate that exceeds the threshold. This user will be presented with a CAPTCHA challenge, as shown in Figure 6. If the user is successful, they will be routed back to the store page. Otherwise, they will be served a new puzzle until it is solved.

Figure 3: CAPTCHA challenge presented to a request that exceeded the threshold

Figure 3: CAPTCHA challenge presented to a request that exceeded the threshold

Implementing rate-based rules and CAPTCHA also allows you to track IP addresses, limit the number of invalid search attempts, and use the specific IP information available to you within sampled requests and AWS WAF logs to work to prevent that traffic from affecting your resources. Additionally, you have visibility into IPs addresses blocked by rate-based rules so that you can later add these addresses to a block list or create custom logic as needed to mitigate false positives.

Conclusion

In this blog post, you learned how to configure and deploy a CAPTCHA challenge with AWS WAF that checks for web requests that exceed a certain rate threshold and requires the client sending such requests to solve a challenge. Please note the additional charge for enabling CAPTCHA on your web ACL (pricing can be found here). Although CAPTCHA challenges are simple for humans to complete, they should be harder for common bots to complete with any meaningful rate of success. You can use a CAPTCHA challenge when a block action would stop too many legitimate requests, but letting all traffic through would result in unacceptably high levels of unwanted requests, such as from bots.

For more information and guidance on AWS WAF rate-based rules, see the blog post The three most important AWS WAF rate-based rules and the AWS whitepaper AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency. You can also check out these additional resources:

 
If you have feedback about this blog post, submit comments in the Comments section below. You can also start a new thread on AWS WAF re:Post to get answers from the community.

Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.

Abhinav Bannerjee

Abhinav Bannerjee

Abhinav is a Solutions Architect based out of Texas. He works closely with small to medium sized businesses to help them scale their adoption of Amazon Web Services.

Fenil Patel

Fenil Patel

Fenil is a Solutions Architect based out of New Jersey. His main focus is helping customers optimize and secure content delivery using AWS Edge Services.

Announcing Turnstile, a user-friendly, privacy-preserving alternative to CAPTCHA

Post Syndicated from Reid Tatoris original https://blog.cloudflare.com/turnstile-private-captcha-alternative/

Announcing Turnstile, a user-friendly, privacy-preserving alternative to CAPTCHA

Announcing Turnstile, a user-friendly, privacy-preserving alternative to CAPTCHA

Today, we’re announcing the open beta of Turnstile, an invisible alternative to CAPTCHA. Anyone, anywhere on the Internet, who wants to replace CAPTCHA on their site will be able to call a simple API, without having to be a Cloudflare customer or sending traffic through the Cloudflare global network. Sign up here for free.

There is no point in rehashing the fact that CAPTCHA provides a terrible user experience. It’s been discussed in detail before on this blog, and countless times elsewhere. The creator of the CAPTCHA has even publicly lamented that he “unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles.” We hate it, you hate it, everyone hates it. Today we’re giving everyone a better option.

Turnstile is our smart CAPTCHA alternative. It automatically chooses from a rotating suite of non-intrusive browser challenges based on telemetry and client behavior exhibited during a session. We talked in an earlier post about how we’ve used our Managed Challenge system to reduce our use of CAPTCHA by 91%. Now anyone can take advantage of this same technology to stop using CAPTCHA on their own site.

UX isn’t the only big problem with CAPTCHA — so is privacy

While having to solve a CAPTCHA is a frustrating user experience, there is also a potential hidden tradeoff a website must make when using CAPTCHA. If you are a small site using CAPTCHA today, you essentially have one option: an 800 pound gorilla with 98% of the CAPTCHA market share. This tool is free to use, but in fact it has a privacy cost: you have to give your data to an ad sales company.

According to security researchers, one of the signals that Google uses to decide if you are malicious is whether you have a Google cookie in your browser, and if you have this cookie, Google will give you a higher score. Google says they don’t use this information for ad targeting, but at the end of the day, Google is an ad sales company. Meanwhile, at Cloudflare, we make money when customers choose us to protect their websites and make their services run better. It’s a simple, direct relationship that perfectly aligns our incentives.

Less data collection, more privacy, same security

In June, we announced an effort with Apple to use Private Access Tokens. Visitors using operating systems that support these tokens, including the upcoming versions of macOS or iOS, can now prove they’re human without completing a CAPTCHA or giving up personal data.

By collaborating with third parties like device manufacturers, who already have the data that would help us validate a device, we are able to abstract portions of the validation process, and confirm data without actually collecting, touching, or storing that data ourselves. Rather than interrogating a device directly, we ask the device vendor to do it for us.

Private Access Tokens are built directly into Turnstile. While Turnstile has to look at some session data (like headers, user agent, and browser characteristics) to validate users without challenging them, Private Access Tokens allow us to minimize data collection by asking Apple to validate the device for us. In addition, Turnstile never looks for cookies (like a login cookie), or uses cookies to collect or store information of any kind. Cloudflare has a long track record of investing in user privacy, which we will continue with Turnstile.

We are opening our CAPTCHA replacement to everyone

To improve the Internet for everyone, we decided to open up the technology that powers our Managed Challenge to everyone in beta as a standalone product called Turnstile.

Rather than try to unilaterally deprecate and replace CAPTCHA with a single alternative, we built a platform to test many alternatives and rotate new challenges in and out as they become more or less effective. With Turnstile, we adapt the actual challenge outcome to the individual visitor/browser. First we run a series of small non-interactive JavaScript challenges gathering more signals about the visitor/browser environment. Those challenges include proof-of-work, proof-of-space, probing for web APIs, and various other challenges for detecting browser-quirks and human behavior. As a result, we can fine-tune the difficulty of the challenge to the specific request.

Turnstile also includes machine learning models that detect common features of end visitors who were able to pass a challenge before. The computational hardness of those initial challenges may vary by visitor, but is targeted to run fast.

Swap out your existing CAPTCHA in a few minutes

You can take advantage of Turnstile and stop bothering your visitors with a CAPTCHA even without being on the Cloudflare network. While we make it as easy as possible to use our network, we don’t want this to be a barrier to improving privacy and user experience.

To switch from a CAPTCHA service, all you need to do is:

  1. Create a Cloudflare account, navigate to the `Turnstile` tab on the navigation bar, and get a sitekey and secret key.
  2. Copy our JavaScript from the dashboard and paste over your old CAPTCHA JavaScript.
  3. Update the server-side integration by replacing the old siteverify URL with ours.

There is more detail on the process below, including options you can configure, but that’s really it. We’re excited about the simplicity of making a change.

Announcing Turnstile, a user-friendly, privacy-preserving alternative to CAPTCHA

Deployment options and analytics

To use Turnstile, first create an account and get your site and secret keys.

Announcing Turnstile, a user-friendly, privacy-preserving alternative to CAPTCHA

Then, copy and paste our HTML snippet:

<script src="https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/api.js" async defer></script>

Once the script is embedded, you can use implicit rendering. Here, the HTML is scanned for elements that have a cf-turnstile class:

<form action="/login" method="POST">
  <div class="cf-turnstile" data-sitekey="yourSiteKey"></div>
  <input type="submit">
</form>

Once a challenge has been solved, a token is injected in your form, with the name cf-turnstile-response. This token can be used with our siteverify endpoint to validate a challenge response. A token can only be validated once, and a token cannot be redeemed twice. The validation can be done on the server side or even in the cloud, for example using a simple Workers fetch (see a demo here):

async function handleRequest() {
    // ... Receive token
    let formData = new FormData();
    formData.append('secret', turnstileISecretKey);
    formData.append('response', receivedToken);
 
    await fetch('https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/siteverify',
        {
            body: formData,
            method: 'POST'
        });
    // ...
}

For more complex use cases, the challenge can be invoked explicitly via JavaScript:

<script>
    window.turnstileCallbackFunction = function () {
        const turnstileOptions = {
            sitekey: 'yourSitekey',
            callback: function(token) {
                console.log(`Challenge Success: ${token}`);
            }
        };
        turnstile.render('#container', turnstileOptions);
    };
</script>
<div id="container"></div>

You can also create what we call ‘Actions’. Custom labels that allow you to distinguish between different pages where you’re using Turnstile, like a login, checkout, or account creation page.

Once you’ve deployed Turnstile, you can go back to the dashboard and see analytics on where you have widgets deployed, how users are solving them, and view any defined actions.

Announcing Turnstile, a user-friendly, privacy-preserving alternative to CAPTCHA

Why are we giving this away for free?

While this is sometimes hard for people outside to believe, helping build a better Internet truly is our mission. This isn’t the first time we’ve built free tools that we think will make the Internet better, and it won’t be the last. It’s really important to us.

So whether or not you’re a Cloudflare customer today, if you’re using a CAPTCHA, try Turnstile for free, instead. You’ll make your users happier, and minimize the data you send to third parties.

Visit this page to sign up for the best invisible, privacy-first, CAPTCHA replacement and to retrieve your Turnstile beta sitekey.

How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-enable-private-access-tokens-in-ios-16-and-stop-seeing-captchas/

How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs

How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs

You go to a website or service, but before access is granted, there’s a visual challenge that forces you to select bikes, buses or traffic lights in a set of images. That can be an exasperating experience. Now, if you have iOS 16 on your iPhone, those days could be over and are just a one-time toggle enabled away.

CAPTCHA = “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”

In 2021, we took direct steps to end the madness that wastes humanity about 500 years per day called CAPTCHAs, that have been making sure you’re human and not a bot. In August 2022, we announced Private Access Tokens. With that, we’re able to eliminate CAPTCHAs on iPhones, iPads and Macs (and more to come) with open privacy-preserving standards.

On September 12, iOS 16 became generally available (iPad 16 and macOS 13 should arrive in October) and on the settings of your device there’s a toggle that can enable the Private Access Token (PAT) technology that will eliminate the need for those CAPTCHAs, and automatically validate that you are a real human visiting a site. If you already have iOS 16, here’s what you should do to confirm that the toggle is “on” (usually it is):

Settings > Apple ID > Password & Security > Automatic Verification (should be enabled)

How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs

What will you get? A completely invisible, private way to validate yourself, and for a website, a way to automatically verify that real users are visiting the site without the horrible CAPTCHA user experience.

Visitors using operating systems that support these tokens, including the upcoming versions of iPad and macOS, can now prove they’re human without completing a CAPTCHA or giving up personal data.

Let’s recap from our August 2022 announcement blog post what this means for different users:

If you’re an Internet user:

  • We’re helping make your mobile web experience more pleasant and more private.
  • You won’t see a CAPTCHA on a supported iOS or Mac device (other devices coming soon!) accessing the Cloudflare network.

If you’re a web or application developer:

  • You’ll know your users are humans coming from an authentic device and signed application, verified by the device vendor directly.
  • And you’ll validate users without maintaining a cumbersome SDK.

If you’re a Cloudflare customer:

  • You don’t have to do anything! Cloudflare will automatically ask for and use Private Access Tokens when using Managed Challenge.
  • Your visitors won’t see a CAPTCHA.

It’s all about simplicity, without compromising on privacy. The work done over a year was a collaboration between Cloudflare and Apple, Google, and other industry leaders to extend the Privacy Pass protocol with support for a new cryptographic token.

These tokens simplify application security for developers and security teams, and obsolete legacy, third-party SDK-based approaches for determining if a human is using a device. They work for browsers, APIs called by browsers, and APIs called within apps. After Apple announced in August that PATs would be incorporated into iOS 16, iPad 16, and macOS 13, the process of ending CAPTCHAs got a big boost. And we expect additional vendors to announce support in the near future.

Cloudflare has already incorporated PATs into our Managed Challenge platform, so any customer using this feature will automatically take advantage of this new technology to improve the browsing experience for supported devices.

In our August in-depth blog post about PATs, you can learn more about how CAPTCHAs don’t work in mobile environments and PATs remove the need for them, and how when sites can’t challenge a visitor with a CAPTCHA, they collect private data.

Improved privacy

In that blog post, we also explain how Private Access Tokens vastly improve privacy by validating without fingerprinting. So, by partnering with third parties like device manufacturers, who already have the data that would help us validate a device, we are able to abstract portions of the validation process, and confirm data without actually collecting, touching, or storing that data ourselves. Rather than interrogating a device directly, we ask the device vendor to do it for us.

Most customers won’t have to do anything to utilize Private Access Tokens. Why? To take advantage of PATs, all you have to do is choose Managed Challenge rather than Legacy CAPTCHA as a response option in a Firewall rule. More than 65% of Cloudflare customers are already doing this.

Now, if you have iOS 16 on your iPhone, it’s your turn.

Private Access Tokens: eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards

Post Syndicated from Reid Tatoris original https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-and-macs-using-new-standard/

Private Access Tokens: eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards

Private Access Tokens: eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards

Today we’re announcing Private Access Tokens, a completely invisible, private way to validate that real users are visiting your site. Visitors using operating systems that support these tokens, including the upcoming versions of macOS or iOS, can now prove they’re human without completing a CAPTCHA or giving up personal data. This will eliminate nearly 100% of CAPTCHAs served to these users.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re an Internet user:

  • We’re making your mobile web experience more pleasant and more private than other networks at the same time.
  • You won’t see a CAPTCHA on a supported iOS or Mac device (other devices coming soon!) accessing the Cloudflare network.

If you’re a web or application developer:

  • Know your user is coming from an authentic device and signed application, verified by the device vendor directly.
  • Validate users without maintaining a cumbersome SDK.

If you’re a Cloudflare customer:

  • You don’t have to do anything!  Cloudflare will automatically ask for and utilize Private Access Tokens
  • Your visitors won’t see a CAPTCHA and we’ll ask for less data from their devices.

Introducing Private Access Tokens

Over the past year, Cloudflare has collaborated with Apple, Google, and other industry leaders to extend the Privacy Pass protocol with support for a new cryptographic token. These tokens simplify application security for developers and security teams, and obsolete legacy, third-party SDK based approaches to determining if a human is using a device. They work for browsers, APIs called by browsers, and APIs called within apps. We call these new tokens Private Access Tokens (PATs). This morning, Apple announced that PATs will be incorporated into iOS 16, iPad 16, and macOS 13, and we expect additional vendors to announce support in the near future.

Cloudflare has already incorporated PATs into our Managed Challenge platform, so any customer using this feature will automatically take advantage of this new technology to improve the browsing experience for supported devices.

Private Access Tokens: eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards

CAPTCHAs don’t work in mobile environments, PATs remove the need for them

We’ve written numerous times about how CAPTCHAs are a terrible user experience. However, we haven’t discussed specifically how much worse the user experience is on a mobile device. CAPTCHA as a technology was built and optimized for a browser-based world. They are deployed via a widget or iframe that is generally one size fits all, leading to rendering issues, or the input window only being partially visible on a device. The smaller real estate on mobile screens inherently makes the technology less accessible and solving any CAPTCHA more difficult, and the need to render JavaScript and image files slows down image loads while consuming excess customer bandwidth.

Private Access Tokens: eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards

Usability aside, mobile environments present an additional challenge in that they are increasingly API-driven. CAPTCHAs simply cannot work in an API environment where JavaScript can’t be rendered, or a WebView can’t be called. So, mobile app developers often have no easy option for challenging a user when necessary. They sometimes resort to using a clunky SDK to embed a CAPTCHA directly into an app. This requires work to embed and customize the CAPTCHA, continued maintenance and monitoring, and results in higher abandonment rates. For these reasons, when our customers choose to show a CAPTCHA today, it’s only shown on mobile 20% of the time.

We recently posted about how we used our Managed Challenge platform to reduce our CAPTCHA use by 91%. But because the CAPTCHA experience is so much worse on mobile, we’ve been separately working on ways we can specifically reduce CAPTCHA use on mobile even further.

When sites can’t challenge a visitor, they collect more data

So, you either can’t use CAPTCHA to protect an API, or the UX is too terrible to use on your mobile website. What options are left for confirming whether a visitor is real? A common one is to look at client-specific data, commonly known as fingerprinting.

You could ask for device IMEI and security patch versions, look at screen sizes or fonts, check for the presence of APIs that indicate human behavior, like interactive touch screen events and compare those to expected outcomes for the stated client. However, all of this data collection is expensive and, ultimately, not respectful of the end user. As a company that deeply cares about privacy and helping make the Internet better, we want to use as little data as possible without compromising the security of the services we provide.

Another alternative is to use system-level APIs that offer device validation checks. This includes DeviceCheck on Apple platforms and SafetyNet on Android. Application services can use these client APIs with their own services to assert that the clients they’re communicating with are valid devices. However, adopting these APIs requires both application and server changes, and can be just as difficult to maintain as SDKs.

Private Access Tokens vastly improve privacy by validating without fingerprinting

This is the most powerful aspect of PATs. By partnering with third parties like device manufacturers, who already have the data that would help us validate a device, we are able to abstract portions of the validation process, and confirm data without actually collecting, touching, or storing that data ourselves. Rather than interrogating a device directly, we ask the device vendor to do it for us.

In a traditional website setup, using the most common CAPTCHA provider:

  • The website you visit knows the URL, your IP, and some additional user agent data.
  • The CAPTCHA provider knows what website you visit, your IP, your device information, collects interaction data on the page, AND ties this data back to other sites where Google has seen you. This builds a profile of your browsing activity across both sites and devices, plus how you personally interact with a page.
Private Access Tokens: eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards

When PATs are used, device data is isolated and explicitly NOT exchanged between the involved parties (the manufacturer and the Cloudflare)

  • The website knows only your URL and IP, which it has to know to make a connection.
  • The device manufacturer (attester) knows only the device data required to attest your device, but can’t tell what website you visited, and doesn’t know your IP.
  • Cloudflare knows the site you visited, but doesn’t know any of your device or interaction information.
Private Access Tokens: eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards

We don’t actually need or want the underlying data that’s being collected for this process, we just want to verify if a visitor is faking their device or user agent. Private Access Tokens allow us to capture that validation state directly, without needing any of the underlying data. They allow us to be more confident in the authenticity of important signals, without having to look at those signals directly ourselves.

How Private Access Tokens compartmentalize data

With Private Access Tokens, four parties agree to work in concert with a common framework to generate and exchange anonymous, unforgeable tokens. Without all four parties in the process, PATs won’t work.

  1. An Origin. A website, application, or API that receives requests from a client. When a website receives a request to their origin, the origin must know to look for and request a token from the client making the request. For Cloudflare customers, Cloudflare acts as the origin (on behalf of customers) and handles the requesting and processing of tokens.
  2. A Client. Whatever tool the visitor is using to attempt to access the Origin. This will usually be a web browser or mobile application. In our example, let’s say the client is a mobile Safari Browser.
  3. An Attester. The Attester is who the client asks to prove something (i.e that a mobile device has a valid IMEI) before a token can be issued. In our example below, the Attester is Apple, the device vendor. An Issuer. The issuer is the only one in the process that actually generates, or issues, a token. The Attester makes an API call to whatever Issuer the Origin has chosen to trust,  instructing the Issuer to produce a token. In our case, Cloudflare will also be the Issuer.
Private Access Tokens: eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards

In the example above, a visitor opens the Safari browser on their iPhone and tries to visit example.com.

  1. Since Example uses Cloudflare to host their Origin, Cloudflare will ask the browser for a token.
  2. Safari supports PATs, so it will make an API call to Apple’s Attester, asking them to attest.
  3. The Apple attester will check various device components, confirm they are valid, and then make an API call to the Cloudflare Issuer (since Cloudflare acting as an Origin chooses to use the Cloudflare Issuer).
  4. The Cloudflare Issuer generates a token, sends it to the browser, which in turn sends it to the origin.
  5. Cloudflare then receives the token, and uses it to determine that we don’t need to show this user a CAPTCHA.

This probably sounds a bit complicated, but the best part is that the website took no action in this process. Asking for a token, validation, token generation, passing, all takes place behind the scenes by third parties that are invisible to both the user and the website. By working together, Apple and Cloudflare have just made this request more secure, reduced the data passed back and forth, and prevented a user from having to see a CAPTCHA. And we’ve done it by both collecting and exchanging less user data than we would have in the past.

Most customers won’t have to do anything to utilize Private Access Tokens

To take advantage of PATs, all you have to do is choose Managed Challenge rather than Legacy CAPTCHA as a response option in a Firewall rule. More than 65% of Cloudflare customers are already doing this. Our Managed Challenge platform will automatically ask every request for a token, and when the client is compatible with Private Access Tokens, we’ll receive one. Any of your visitors using an iOS or macOS device will automatically start seeing fewer CAPTCHAs once they’ve upgraded their OS.

This is just step one for us. We are actively working to get other clients and device makers utilizing the PAT framework as well. Any time a new client begins utilizing the PAT framework, traffic coming to your site from that client will automatically start asking for tokens, and your visitors will automatically see fewer CAPTCHAs.

We will be incorporating PATs into other security products very soon. Stay tuned for some announcements in the near future.

The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

Post Syndicated from Reid Tatoris original https://blog.cloudflare.com/end-cloudflare-captcha/

The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

There is no point in rehashing the fact that CAPTCHA provides a terrible user experience. It’s been discussed in detail before on this blog, and countless times elsewhere. One of the creators of the CAPTCHA has publicly lamented that he “unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles.” We don’t like them, and you don’t like them.

So we decided we’re going to stop using CAPTCHAs. Using an iterative platform approach, we have already reduced the number of CAPTCHAs we choose to serve by 91% over the past year.

Before we talk about how we did it, and how you can help, let’s first start with a simple question.

Why in the world is CAPTCHA still used anyway?

If everyone agrees CAPTCHA is so bad, if there have been calls to get rid of it for 15 years, if the creator regrets creating it, why is it still widely used?

The frustrating truth is that CAPTCHA remains an effective tool for differentiating real human users from bots despite the existence of CAPTCHA-solving services. Of course, this comes with a huge trade off in terms of usability, but generally the alternatives to CAPTCHA are blocking or allowing traffic, which will inherently increase either false positives or false negatives. With a choice between increased errors and a poor user experience (CAPTCHA), many sites choose CAPTCHA.

CAPTCHAs are also a safe choice because so many other sites use them. They delegate abuse response to a third party, and remove the risk from the website with a simple integration. Using the most common solution will rarely get you into trouble. Plug, play, forget.

Lastly, CAPTCHA is useful because it has a long history of a known and stable baseline. We’ve tracked a metric called CAPTCHA (or Challenge) Solve Rate for many years. CAPTCHA solve rate is the number of CAPTCHAs solved, divided by the number of page loads. For our purposes both failing or not attempting to solve the CAPTCHA count as a failure, since in either case a user cannot access the content they want to. We find this metric to typically be stable for any particular website. That is, if the solve rate is 1%, it tends to remain at 1% over time. We also find that any change in solve rate – up or down – is a strong indicator of an attack in progress. Customers can monitor the solve rate and create alerts to notify them when it changes, then investigate what might be happening.

Many alternatives to CAPTCHA have been tried, including our own Cryptographic Attestation. However, to date, none have seen the amount of widespread adoption of CAPTCHAs. We believe attempting to replace CAPTCHA with a single alternative is the main reason why. When you replace CAPTCHA, you lose the stable history of the solve rate, and making decisions becomes more difficult. If you switch from deciphering text to picking images, you will get vastly different results. How do you know if those results are good or bad? So, we took a different approach.

Many solutions, not one

Rather than try to unilaterally deprecate and replace CAPTCHA with a single alternative, we built a platform to test many alternatives and see which had the best potential to replace CAPTCHA. We call this Cloudflare Managed Challenge.

The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

Managed Challenge is a smarter solution than CAPTCHA. It defers the decision about whether to serve a visual puzzle to a later point in the flow after more information is available from the browser. Previously, a Cloudflare customer could only choose between either a CAPTCHA or JavaScript Challenge as the action of a security or firewall rule. Now, the Managed Challenge option will decide to show a visual puzzle or other means of proving humanness to visitors based on the client behavior exhibited during a challenge and based on the telemetry we receive from the visitor. A customer simply tells us, “I want you (Cloudflare) to take appropriate actions to challenge this type of traffic as you see necessary.

With Managed Challenge, we adapt the actual challenge outcome to the individual visitor/browser. As a result, we can fine-tune the difficulty of the challenge itself and avoid showing visual puzzles to more than 90% of human requests, while at the same time presenting harder challenges to visitors that exhibit non-human behaviors.

When a visitor encounters a Managed Challenge, we first run a series of small non-interactive JavaScript challenges gathering more signals about the visitor/browser environment. This means we deploy in-browser detections and challenges at the time the request is made. Challenges are selected based on what characteristics the visitor emits and based on the initial information we have about the visitor. Those challenges include, but are not limited to, proof-of-work, proof-of-space, probing for web APIs, and various challenges for detecting browser-quirks and human behavior.

They also include machine learning models that detect common features of end visitors who were able to pass a CAPTCHA before. The computational hardness of those initial challenges may vary by visitor, but is targeted to run fast. Managed Challenge is also integrated into the Cloudflare Bot Management and Super Bot Fight Mode systems by consuming signals and data from the bot detections.

After our non-interactive challenges have been run, we evaluate the gathered signals. If by the combination of those signals we are confident that the visitor is likely human, no further action is taken, and the visitor is redirected to the destined page without any interaction required. However, in some cases, if the signal is weak, we present a visual puzzle to the visitor to prove their humanness. In the context of Managed Challenge, we’re also experimenting with other privacy-preserving means of attesting humanness, to continue reducing the portion of time that Managed Challenge uses a visual puzzle step.

We started testing Managed Challenge last year, and initially, we chose from a rotating subset of challenges, one of them being CAPTCHA. At the start, CAPTCHA was still used in the vast majority of cases. We compared the solve rate for the new challenge in question, with the existing, stable solve rate for CAPTCHA. We thus used CAPTCHA solve rate as a goal to work towards as we improved our CAPTCHA alternatives, getting better and better over time. The challenge platform allows our engineers to easily create, deploy, and test new types of challenges without impacting customers. When a challenge turns out to not be useful, we simply deprecate it. When it proves to be useful, we increase how often it is used. In order to preserve ground-truth, we also randomly choose a small subset of visitors to always solve a visual puzzle to validate our signals.

Managed Challenge performs better than CAPTCHA

The Challenge Platform now has the same stable solve rate as previously used CAPTCHAs.

The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

Using an iterative platform approach, we have reduced the number of CAPTCHAs we serve by 91%. This is only the start. By the end of the year, we will reduce our use of CAPTCHA as a challenge to less than 1%. By skipping the visual puzzle step for almost all visitors, we are able to reduce the visitor time spent in a challenge from an average of 32 seconds to an average of just one second to run our non-interactive challenges. We also see churn improvements: our telemetry indicates that visitors with human properties are 31% less likely to abandon a Managed Challenge than on the traditional CAPTCHA action.

Today, the Managed Challenge platform rotates between many challenges. A Managed Challenge instance consists of many sub-challenges: some of them are established and effective, whereas others are new challenges we are experimenting with. All of them are much, much faster and easier for humans to complete than CAPTCHA, and almost always require no interaction from the visitor.

Managed Challenge replaces CAPTCHA for Cloudflare

We have now deployed Managed Challenge across the entire Cloudflare network. Any time we show a CAPTCHA to a visitor, it’s via the Managed Challenge platform, and only as a benchmark to confirm our other challenges are performing as well.

All Cloudflare customers can now choose Managed Challenge as a response option to any Firewall rule instead of CAPTCHA. We’ve also updated our dashboard to encourage all Cloudflare customers to make this choice.

The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

You’ll notice that we changed the name of the CAPTCHA option to ‘Legacy CAPTCHA’. This more accurately describes what CAPTCHA is: an outdated tool that we don’t think people should use. As a result, the usage of CAPTCHA across the Cloudflare network has dropped significantly, and usage of managed challenge has increased dramatically.

The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

As noted above, today CAPTCHA represents 9% of Managed Challenge solves (light blue), but that number will decrease to less than 1% by the end of the year. You’ll also see the gray bar above, which shows when our customers have chosen to show a CAPTCHA as a response to a Firewall rule triggering. We want that number to go to zero, but the good news is that 63% of customers now choose Managed Challenge rather than CAPTCHA when they create a Firewall rule with a challenge response action.

The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

We expect this number to increase further over time.

If you’re using the Cloudflare WAF, log into the Dashboard today and look at all of your Firewall rules. If any of your rules are using “Legacy CAPTCHA” as a response, please change it now! Select the “Managed Challenge” response option instead. You’ll give your users a better experience, while maintaining the same level of protection you have today. If you’re not currently a Cloudflare customer, stay tuned for ways you can reduce your own use of CAPTCHA.

Privacy Pass v3: the new privacy bits

Post Syndicated from Pop Chunhapanya original https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-v3/

Privacy Pass v3: the new privacy bits

Privacy Pass v3: the new privacy bits

In November 2017, we released our implementation of a privacy preserving protocol to let users prove that they are humans without enabling tracking. When you install Privacy Pass’s browser extension, you get tokens when you solve a Cloudflare CAPTCHA which can be used to avoid needing to solve one again… The redeemed token is cryptographically unlinkable to the token originally provided by the server. That is why Privacy Pass is privacy preserving.

In October 2019, Privacy Pass reached another milestone. We released Privacy Pass Extension v2.0 that includes a new service provider (hCaptcha) which provides a way to redeem a token not only with CAPTCHAs in the Cloudflare challenge pages but also hCaptcha CAPTCHAs in any website. When you encounter any hCaptcha CAPTCHA in any website, including the ones not behind Cloudflare, you can redeem a token to pass the CAPTCHA.

We believe Privacy Pass solves an important problem — balancing privacy and security for bot mitigation— but we think there’s more to be done in terms of both the codebase and the protocol. We improved the codebase by redesigning how the service providers interact with the core extension. At the same time, we made progress on the standardization at IETF and improved the protocol by adding metadata which allows us to do more fabulous things with Privacy Pass.

Announcing Privacy Pass Extension v3.0

The current implementation of our extension is functional, but it is difficult to maintain two Privacy Pass service providers: Cloudflare and hCaptcha. So we decided to refactor the browser extension to improve its maintainability. We also used this opportunity to make following improvements:

  • Implement the extension using TypeScript instead of plain JavaScript.
  • Build the project using a module bundler instead of custom build scripts.
  • Refactor the code and define the API for the cryptographic primitive.
  • Treat provider-specific code as an encapsulated software module rather than a list of configuration properties.

As a result of the improvements listed above, the extension will be less error-prone and each service provider will have more flexibility and can be integrated seamlessly with other providers.

In the new extension we use TypeScript instead of plain JavaScript because its syntax is a kind of extension to JavaScript, and we already use TypeScript in Workers. One of the things that makes TypeScript special is that it has features that are only available in modern programming languages, like null safety.

Support for Future Service Providers

Another big improvement in v3.0 is that it is designed for modularity, meaning that it will be very easy to add a new potential service provider in the future. A new provider can use an API provided by us to implement their own request flow to use the Privacy Pass protocol and to handle the HTTP requests. By separating the provider-specific code from the core extension code using the API, the extension will be easier to update when there is a need for more service providers.

On a technical level, we allow each service provider to have its own WebRequest API event listeners instead of having central event listeners for all the providers. This allows providers to extend the browser extension’s functionality and implement any request handling logic they want.

Another major change that enables us to do this is that we moved away from configuration to programmable modularization.

Configuration vs Modularization

As mentioned in 2019, it would be impossible to expect different service providers to all abide by the same exact request flow, so we decided to use a JSON configuration file in v2.0 to define the request flow. The configuration allows the service providers to easily modify the extension characteristics without dealing too much with the core extension code. However, recently we figured out that we can improve it without using a configuration file, and using modules instead.

Using a configuration file limits the flexibility of the provider by the number of possible configurations. In addition, when the logic of each provider evolves and deviates from one another, the size of configuration will grow larger and larger which makes it hard to document and keep track of. So we decided to refactor how we determine the request flow from using a configuration file to using a module file written specifically for each service provider instead.

Privacy Pass v3: the new privacy bits

By using a programmable module, the providers are not limited by the available fields in the configuration. In addition, the providers can use the available implementations of the necessary cryptographic primitives in any point of the request flow because we factored out the crypto bits into a separate module which can be used by any provider. In the future, if the cryptographic primitives ever change, the providers can update the code and use it any time.

Towards Standard Interoperability

The Privacy Pass protocol was first published at the PoPETS symposium in 2018. As explained in this previous post, the core of the Privacy Pass protocol is a secure way to generate tokens between server and client. To that end, the protocol requires evaluating a pseudorandom function that is oblivious and verifiable. The first property prevents the server from learning information about the client’s tokens, while the client learns nothing about the server’s private key. This is useful to protect the privacy of users. The token generation must also be verifiable in the sense that the client can attest to the fact that its token was minted using the server’s private key.

The original implementation of Privacy Pass has seen real-world use in our browser extension, helping to reduce CAPTCHAs for hundreds of thousands of people without compromising privacy. But to guarantee interoperability between services implementing Privacy Pass, what’s required is an accurate specification of the protocol and its operations. With this motivation, the Privacy Pass protocol was proposed as an Internet draft at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) — to know more about our participation at IETF look at the post.

In March 2020, the protocol was presented at IETF-107 for the first time. The session was a Birds-of-a-Feather, a place where the IETF community discusses the creation of new working groups that will write the actual standards. In the session, the working group’s charter is presented and proposes to develop a secure protocol for redeeming unforgeable tokens that attest to the validity of some attribute being held by a client. The charter was later approved, and three documents were integrated covering the protocol, the architecture, and an HTTP API for supporting Privacy Pass. The working group at IETF can be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/.

Additionally, to its core functionality, the Privacy Pass protocol can be extended to improve its usability or to add new capabilities. For instance, adding a mechanism for public verifiability will allow a third party, someone who did not participate in the protocol, to verify the validity of tokens. Public verifiability can be implemented using a blind-signature scheme — this is a special type of digital signatures firstly proposed by David Chaum in which signers can produce signatures on messages without learning the content of the message. A diversity of algorithms to implement blind-signatures exist; however, there is still work to be done to define a good candidate for public verifiability.

Another extension for Privacy Pass is the support for including metadata in the tokens. As this is a feature with high impact on the protocol, we devote a larger section to explain the benefits of supporting metadata in the face of hoarding attacks.

Future work: metadata

What is research without new challenges that arise? What does development look like if there are no other problems to solve? During the design and development of Privacy Pass (both as a service, as an idea, and as a protocol), a potential vector for abuse was noted, which will be referred to as a “hoarding” or “farming” attack. This attack consists of individual users or groups of users that can gather tokens over a long period of time and redeem them all at once with the aim of, for example, overwhelming a website and making the service unavailable for other users. In a more complex scenario, an attacker can build up a stock of tokens that they could then redistribute amongst other clients. This redistribution ability is possible as tokens are not linked to specific clients, which is a property of the Privacy Pass protocol.

There have been several proposed solutions to this attack. One can, for example, make the verification of tokens procedure very efficient, so attackers will need to hoard an even larger amount of tokens in order to overwhelm a service. But the problem is not only about making verification times faster, and, therefore, this does not completely solve the problem. Note that in Privacy Pass, a successful token redemption could be exchanged for a single-origin cookie. These cookies allow clients to avoid future challenges for a particular domain without using more tokens. In the case of a hoarding attack, an attacker could trade in their hoarded number of tokens for a number of cookies. An attacker can, then, mount a layer 7 DDoS attack with the “hoarded” cookies, which would render the service unavailable.

In the next sections, we will explore other different solutions to this attack.

A simple solution and its limitations: key rotation

What does “key rotation” mean in the context of Privacy Pass? In Privacy Pass, each token is attested by keys held by the service. These keys are further used to verify the honesty of a token presented by a client when trying to access a challenge-protected service. “Key rotation” means updating these keys with regard to a chosen epoch (meaning, for example, that every two weeks — the epoch —, the keys will be rotated). Regular key rotation, then, implies that tokens belong to these epochs and cannot be used outside them, which prevents stocks of tokens from being useful for longer than the epoch they belong to.

Keys, however, should not be rotated frequently as:

  • Rotating a key can lead to security implications
  • Establishing trust in a frequently-rotating key service can be a challenging problem
  • The unlinkability of the client when using tokens can be diminished

Let’s explore these problems one by one now:

Rotating a key can lead to security implications, as past keys need to be deleted from secure storage locations and replaced with new ones. This process is prone to failure if done regularly, and can lead to potential key material leakage.

Establishing trust in a frequently-rotating key service can be a challenging problem, as keys will have to be verified by the needed parties each time they are regenerated. Keys need to be verified as it has to be attested that they belong to the entity one is trying to communicate with. If keys rotate too frequently, this verification procedure will have to happen frequently as well, so that an attacker will not be able to impersonate the honest entity with a “fake” public key.

The unlinkability of the client when using tokens can be diminished as a savvy attacker (a malicious server, for example) could link token generation and token future-use. In the case of a malicious server, it can, for example, rotate their keys too often to violate unlinkability or could pick a separate public key for each client issuance. In these cases, this attack can be solved by the usage of public mechanisms to record which server’s public keys are used; but this requires further infrastructure and coordination between actors. Other cases are not easily solvable by this “public verification”: if keys are rotated every minute, for example, and a client was the only one to visit a “privacy pass protected” site in that minute, then, it’s not hard to infer (to “link”) that the token came only from this specific client.

A novel solution: Metadata

A novel solution to this “hoarding” problem that does not require key rotation or further optimization of verification times is the addition of metadata. This approach was introduced in the paper “A Fast and Simple Partially Oblivious PRF, with Applications”, and it is called the “POPRF with metadata” construction. The idea is to add a metadata field to the token generation procedure in such a way that tokens are cryptographically linked to this added metadata. The added metadata can be, for example, a number that signals which epoch this token belongs to. The service, when presented with this token on verification, promptly checks that it corresponds to its internal epoch number (this epoch number can correspond to a period of time, a threshold of number of tokens issued, etc.). If it does not correspond, this token is expired and cannot be further used. Metadata, then, can be used to expire tokens without performing key rotations, thereby avoiding some issues outlined above.

Other kinds of metadata can be added to the Partially Oblivious PRF (PO-PRF) construction as well. Geographic location can be added, which signals that tokens can only be used in a specific region.

The limits of metadata

Note, nevertheless, that the addition of this “metadata” should be carefully considered as adding, in the case of “time-metadata”, an explicit time bound signal will diminish the unlikability set of the tokens. If an explicit time-bound signal is added (for example, the specific time — year, month, day, hour, minute and seconds — in which this token was generated and the amount of time it is valid for), it will allow a malicious server to link generation and usage. The recommendation is to use “opaque metadata”: metadata that is public to both client and service but that only the service knows its precise meaning. A server, for example, can set a counter that gets increased after a period of time (for example, every two weeks). The server will add this counter as metadata rather than the period of time. The client, in this case, publicly knows what this counter is but does not know to which period it refers to.

Geographic location metadata should be coarse as well: it should refer to a large geographical area, such as a continent, or political and economic union rather than an explicit location.

Wrap up

The Privacy Pass protocol provides users with a secure way for redeeming tokens. At Cloudflare, we use the protocol to reduce the number of CAPTCHAs improving the user experience while browsing websites. A natural evolution of the protocol is expected, ranging from its standardization to innovating with new capabilities that help to prevent abuse of the service.

On the service side, we refactored the Privacy Pass browser extension aiming to improve the quality of the code, so bugs can be detected in earlier phases of the development. The code is available at the challenge-bypass-extension repository, and we invite you to try the release candidate version.

An appealing extension for Privacy Pass is the inclusion of metadata as it provides a non-cumbersome way to solve hoarding attacks, while preserving the anonymity (in general, the privacy) of the protocol itself. Our paper provides you more information about the technical details behind this idea.

The application of the Privacy Pass protocol in other use cases or to create other service providers requires a certain degree of compatibility. People wanting to implement Privacy Pass must be able to have a standard specification, so implementations can interoperate. The efforts along these lines are centered on the Privacy Pass working group at IETF, a space open for anyone to participate in delineating the future of the protocol. Feel free to be part of these efforts too.

We are continuously working on new ways of improving our services and helping the Internet be a better and a more secure place. You can join us on this effort and can reach us at research.cloudflare.com. See you next time.