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Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement with FIDO2/WebAuthn is a bad idea

herrjemand.medium.com

31–40 of 294 posts

Re: Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement with FIDO2/WebAuthn is a bad idea

#31
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see us getting a massive innovation in search on the internet now that Google has such a massive foothold, and companies like Cloudflare stop innovation from happening. How are we "stopping search innovation"?

For instance there is no way for distributed search engines to work with CloudFlare. No, "contact me and we'll help" is not always a solution.

Please explain the problem (here or via email to me).

Re: Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement with FIDO2/WebAuthn is a bad idea

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crawling a Cloudflare powered website is basically impossible without needing to do some bodges as to how to crawl it. How can you expect someone to crawl a bunch of websites if they are actively blocked from accessing it? Now, you might say users can whitelist bots in their robots.txt file but then again will the person creating the engine individually ask companies to allow them to crawl? Also, slightly unrelated b…

If you are building a search engine and getting blocked you can always contact me and I'll make sure that the teams that work on bot detection and DDoS are aware. We would like to know because we should not be blocking a legit crawler like this.

For every developer that sees this message, a few dozen will have given up.

Re: Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement with FIDO2/WebAuthn is a bad idea

#33
post #22
post #12

Cloudflare is both a great thing and a terrible thing that has happened to the internet in recent years. Great in that they have a fantastic UI to add your site in, basically shielding the average user from attacks. Bad from a standpoint of that now only Google, Bing, and maybe other big search engines have the capabilities to actually crawl the internet now. I don't see us getting a massive innovation in search on t…

There was once cs professor who claimed that the internet does not scale around 2000. Either things choke up or you need huge investments into networks. It turns out that he was right, sort of. The vanilla attach server into the internet, server-to-client IP-network is pretty much dead. It has been replaced with CDN's , private delivery networks, cache on top of cache. Cloudfare, Amazon, Google and MS are the connect…

Is it pretty much dead? Yeah, if you’re moving FAANG level traffic you need something more fancy than LAMP + an internet connection, but I’ve seen dozens and dozens of sites with a plain old no-cdn, no-pdn, LAMP tech stack. Working with startups might bias your view - lots of companies are running extremely boring setups and they work just great.

Re: Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement with FIDO2/WebAuthn is a bad idea

#36
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153635

This will scale wonderfully!

No, what scales is us making our DDoS and bot detection not disrupt the crawling of legit search engines that respect robots.txt, don't crawl at ridiculous speeds, don't do dumb stuff like pretend they are the Googlebot. We have teams who work on that. You can read more here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/bots/

But let's suppose someone is building a new cool search engine and our ML stuff is blocking them. Then... contact us/me.

Re: Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement with FIDO2/WebAuthn is a bad idea

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crawling a Cloudflare powered website is basically impossible without needing to do some bodges as to how to crawl it. How can you expect someone to crawl a bunch of websites if they are actively blocked from accessing it? Now, you might say users can whitelist bots in their robots.txt file but then again will the person creating the engine individually ask companies to allow them to crawl? Also, slightly unrelated b…

If you are building a search engine and getting blocked you can always contact me and I'll make sure that the teams that work on bot detection and DDoS are aware. We would like to know because we should not be blocking a legit crawler like this.

Say I’m interested in building a small scale domain-specific search engine and only just started development. There’s no prototype yet and may never be. In this situation, how do you determine it’s a legit crawler?

And what about crawlers with even more limited scopes (targeting only a handful of sites) that they can’t possibly be called search engines? Are they ever considered legit?

Re: Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement with FIDO2/WebAuthn is a bad idea

#39
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the idea here is you need to buy actual FIDO U2F keys and they could then be revoked on a per-key basis if you're caught abusing them as they're signed by a 3rd party so can't just be emulated. Meaning you need to buy more. Makes it expensive at least.

How can you revoke on a per-key basis without at the same time being able to track keys uniquely?

Yup, you can't. Keys are perfectly trackable by Cloudflare, but they promise they won't do this.

Edit: I was wrong. Cloudflare claims they could track people, but it would require tracking via cookies. [1] The hardware security keys have an "attestation key pair" that is shared among all units in one production batch (which contains at least 100K units). [2]

1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attest...

2: https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn-2/#sctn-attestation-privacy

Re: Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement with FIDO2/WebAuthn is a bad idea

#40
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For instance there is no way for distributed search engines to work with CloudFlare. No, "contact me and we'll help" is not always a solution.

Please explain the problem (here or via email to me).

I’m really sorry, but you appear to be the CTO of Cloudflare, which makes your not knowing the ins and outs of the problem already and basic questioning of it seem like sealioning.[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

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