Cloudflare Wants To Replace CAPTCHAs With Turnstile
Ahead of its Connect conference in October, Cloudflare this week announced an ambitious new project called Turnstile, which seeks to do away with the CAPTCHAs used throughout the web to verify people are who they say they are. From a report: Available to site owners at no charge, Cloudflare customers or no, Turnstile chooses from a rotating suite of "browser challenges" to check that visitors to a webpage aren't, in fact, bots. CAPTCHAs, the challenge-response tests most of us have encountered when filling out forms, have been around for decades, and they've been relatively successfully at keeping bot traffic at bay. But the rise of cheap labor, bugs in various CAPTCHA flavors and automated solvers have begun to poke holes in the system. Several websites offer human- and AI-backed CAPTCHA-solving services for as low as $0.50 per thousand solved CAPTCHAs, and some researchers claim AI-based attacks can successfully solve CAPTCHAs used by the world's most popular websites. Cloudflare itself was once a CAPTCHA user. But according to CTO John Graham-Cumming, the company was never quite satisfied with it -- if Cloudflare's public rallying cries hadn't made that clear. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Graham-Cumming listed what he sees as the many downsides of CAPTCHA technology, including poor accessibility (visual disabilities can make it impossible to solve a CAPTCHA), cultural bias (CAPTCHAs assume familiarity with objects like U.S. taxis) and the strains that CAPTCHAs place on mobile data plans. [...] Turnstile automatically chooses a browser challenge based on "telemetry and client behavior exhibited during a session," Cloudflare says, rather than factors like login cookies. After running non-interactive JavaScript challenges to gather signals about the visitor and browser environment and using AI models to detect features and visitors who've passed a challenge before, Turnstile fine-tunes the difficulty of the challenge to the specific request -- avoiding having users solve a puzzle.
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