10 ms·

Web Bot Auth

82 points by ananddtyagi 1y ago

mips_avatar 1y ago
Cloudflare's verified bots program is a terrible idea. They want to be the central chokepoint for agents, and they're doing it in shady ways like auto enrolling customers into blocking agents.
- threatofrain 1y ago
  That’s not shady, that’s awesome customer value! Bot blocking as Default option is a great choice for all of us.
  - 1gn15 1y ago
    It's discriminatory against robots and helps make the web even more locked down. DRM never works; the analog hole is always the nuclear option. In the end, only people with non-mainstream browsers (or using VPN to escape country-level blocks, or Tor, or noJS) suffer. It's like how anti-piracy measures only affect paying customers, while pirates ironically get a better experience. The best way to get around endless CAPTCHAs is to just use LLMs instead.
    - threatofrain 1y ago
      > It's discriminatory against robots You would... lead your response with that argument? This has nothing to do with DRM. When people talk about how bots suck, the focus is on billion or trillion dollar businesses making everyone on the web pay. There's also a reason why the bot conversation flared up; we've always had bots, but before the conversation centered on Google and SEO. Now the conversation centers on companies like OpenAI.
    - johneth 1y ago
      > It's discriminatory against robots That's the entire point.
zb3 1y ago
Seems like Cloudflare wants to regulate the internet.. they should not have that power.
- kylehotchkiss 1y ago
  Disagree. Not everybody wants their sites scraped and their content used to train a model that they'll never see a penny from. Cloudflare is the only party who wants to build a system where both the models and individual sites have their interests respected.
  - ATechGuy 1y ago
    Are you sure that CF can stop AI bots?
    - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
      Do you have a better alternative?
      - ATechGuy 1y ago
        Have you looked into open-source alternatives? I'm assuming that it's a pressing problem for you, and you have already explored alternatives.
        tick_tock_tick 1y ago
        I have, sadly they are basically worthless and often worse then worthless as they negatively impact the site.
        ATechGuy 1y ago
        Interesting. Care to list them here so that we all can learn.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
bobbiechen 1y ago
I disagree with the other top-level comments at the moment: I believe Web Bot Auth is a useful and non-centralized emerging standard for self-identifying bots and agents. This press release today is a better statement of _why_ this feature exists (as opposed to the submission link, which is nuts-and-bolts of implementing): https://blog.cloudflare.com/signed-agents/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/signed-agents/ Web Bot Auth is a way for bots to self-identify cryptographically. Unlike the user agent header (which is trivially spoofed) or known IPs (painful to manage), Web Bot Auth uses HTTP Message Signatures using the bot's key, which should be published at some well-known location. This is a good thing! We want bots to be able to self-identify in a way that can't be impersonated. This gives website operators the power to allow or deny well-behaved bots with precision. It doesn't change anything about bots who try to hide their identity, who are not going to self-identify anyways. It's worth reading the proposal on the details: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-web-bot-auth-architecture https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-web-bot-... . Nothing about this is limited to Cloudflare. I'm also working on support for Web Bot Auth for our Agent Identification project at Stytch https://www.isagent.dev https://www.isagent.dev . Well-behaved bots benefit from this self-identification because it enables a better Agent Experience: https://stytch.com/blog/introducing-is-agent/ https://stytch.com/blog/introducing-is-agent/
- binarymax 1y ago
  I agree in principle, but I disagree that it should be designed and mandated by a private gatekeeper
  - jacobn 1y ago
    Isn't that how most web standards got their start? One of the interested parties pushed something, then things evolved through the standards process? (And then it can of course get derailed, but that's a separate story)
  - jrochkind1 1y ago
    What's now at the top has links to IETF drafts in the first paragraph. What am I missing? A way to authenticate identity for crawlers so I can allow-list ones I want to get in, exempt them from turnstile/captcha, etc -- is something I need. I'm not following what makes this controversial. Cryptographic verification of identity for web requests, sounds right.
realityfactchex 1y ago
No offense, but screw CloudFlare, screw their captchas for humans, and screw their wedging themselves between web operators and web users. They can offer what they want for bots. But stop ruining the experience for humans first.
- tick_tock_tick 1y ago
  > screw their wedging themselves between web operators and web users Web operators choose to use them; hell they even pay Cloudflare to be between them. Seriously I just think you don't understand how bad it is to run a site without someone in-front of it.
  - mcspiff 1y ago
    Couldn’t agree more — Much like running my own DNS or email server, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to running my own website directly on the internet. It’s just not worth the hassle. For stuff only I use, it sits behind my VPN. For anything that _must_ be public, it’s going behind a WAF someone else can run.
  - immibis 1y ago
    They don't have to, but they're tricked into doing so. Via marketing.
    - acdha 1y ago
      I miss the 90s, too, but these days anyone who wants to deal with current levels of bot traffic is probably going to look at a service like Cloudflare as much cheaper than the amount of ops time they’d otherwise spend keeping things up and secure.
      - immibis 1y ago
        You could just, like, not make a website that takes several seconds to handle each request. I let bots hit Gitea 2-3 times per second on a $10/month VPS, and the only actual problem was that it doesn't seem to ever delete zip snapshots, filling up the disk when enough snapshot links are clicked. So I disabled that feature by setting the snapshots folder read-only. There were no other problems. I mention Gitea because people complain about having to protect Gitea a lot, for some reason.
nerdsniper 1y ago
Why use a "web bot" instead of an API? Either can be driven by an AI "agent"...but this just seems like an "API key for a visual api interface", and rather wasteful in cost and resources. If a company could afford to pay a partner for an API key they wouldn't need this. If they can't afford to pay the partner for access -- they'd still be blocked with or without "Web Bot Auth". I don't understand what this is for. I suspect I'm missing something, what am I missing?
- observationist 1y ago
  Part of it, at least, is people thinking they've solved some perceived problem and being told by their chatbot that it's a terrific, brilliant new innovation and they should build a whole new protocol spec for it.
- notatoad 1y ago
  if you already have an api that exposes all the information that your parter who is willing to pay for an API key wants, then sure, that's perfect. but what if you don't have an API, or your API doesn't expose the information that crawlers are looking for? they want to crawl your website, they're willing to pay for the ability to crawl your website, but you don't want to build an API... i'm sure the next step here will be a cloudflare product that sits in front of your website and blocks all bot traffic except for the bots that are verified to have paid for access. (or maybe that already exists?)
- mediaman 1y ago
  The website the human sees is the new API. That's needed because many APIs are either nonexistent or extremely marginal in design and content coverage.
cuuupid 1y ago
Cloudflare is the last party that should be running this for two reasons. 1. THey have already proven to be a bad faith actor with their "DDoS protection." 2. This is pretty much the typical Cloudflare HN playbook. They release soemthing targeted at the current wave and hide behind an ideological barrier; meanwhile if you try to use them for anything serious they require a call with sales who jumps you with absurdly high pricing. Do other cloud providers charge high fees for things they have no business charging for? Absolutely. But they typically tell you upfront and don't run ideological narratives. This is not a company we should be putting much trust in, especially not with their continued plays to become the gatekeepers of the internet.
- esseph 1y ago
  Have you seen large cloud provider billing????? There is a whole segment of tech designed around helping you understand and manage cloud costs, through consultations, automations, etc. It has spawned companies and career paths!
  - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
    Ime, cloud cost centres are intentionally confusing and annoying. I get emails telling me to check their dashboard for billing info which I inevitably never do. It’s designed that way.
  - cuuupid 1y ago
    Yes but they don’t hide that behind ideological nonsense, they own up to it. They’re a good faith actor with a high price tag
- tick_tock_tick 1y ago
  1) how so? Pretty much everything they do for DDoS protection is at their customers choice. You might not like what people want for their site but lets not pretend that most companies aren't very happy with it. 2) Then don't use them? Either they provide enough value to pay them or they don't.
mtrovo 1y ago
As much as I understand this is needed it rubs me the wrong way. The standard looks fine as a distributed protocol until you have to register to pay a rent to Cloudflare, which they say will eventually trickle down into publishers pocket but you know what having a middleman this powerful means to the power dynamics of the market. Publishers have a really bad hand no matter what we do to save them, content as we know it will have to adapt. Give it a couple more iterations and some MBA will come up with the brilliant idea of introducing an internet toll to humans and selling a content bundle with unlimited access to websites.
- tick_tock_tick 1y ago
  There is just too much spam and it's not clear that is a solvable problem without Cloudflare (or some other similar service). Maybe if they get big enough the incentives to spam will vanish and non Cloudflare sites can exist in peace (at-least until enough people leave Cloudflare that spam become profitable again).
- maxwellg 1y ago
  Cloudflare is only the first to market with a solution. If this proposal catches on every WAF vendor under the sun will have it implemented before the next sales cycle. Enforcement of this standard will be commoditized down to nothing.
jithinraj 1y ago
Web Bot Auth solves authentication (“who is this bot?”) but not authorization/usage control. We still need a machine-readable policy layer so sites can express “what this bot may do, under which terms” (purpose limits, retention, attribution, optional pricing) at a well-known path, robots.txt-like, but enforceable via signatures. A practical flow: 1. Bot self-identifies (Web Bot Auth) 2. Fetch policy 3. Accept terms or negotiate (HTTP 402 exists) 4. Present a signed receipt proving consent/payment 5. Origin/CDN verifies receipt and grants access That keeps things decentralized: identity is transport; policy stays with the site; receipts provide auditability, no single gatekeeper required. There’s ongoing work in this direction (e.g., PEAC using /.well-known/peac.txt) that aims to pair Web Bot Auth with site-controlled terms and verifiable receipts. Disclosure: I work on PEAC, but the pattern applies regardless of implementation.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
URL should be blog post: The age of agents: cryptographically recognizing agent traffic https://blog.cloudflare.com/signed-agents/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/signed-agents/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052276)
bgwalter 1y ago
Cloudflare is playing both sides: grok.com is served by Cloudflare.
- immibis 1y ago
  Famously, a lot of DDoS-for-hire providers were served by Cloudflare. CF has a strong interest in making sure you can always get DDoSed.
hoppp 1y ago
I like that parsable signature in the http message however I dont quite understand how the system differentiates between human users and an llm agent controlling a browser
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
egorfine 1y ago
I will employ every tool in my toolbox in different ways before I bend to this. Especially before I bend to cloudflare.
nembal 1y ago
Web Bot Auth solves a real problem with a real standard. Per-request signatures make automated traffic accountable, and that is the right long-term primitive. In Cloudflare’s hands, the current implementation is built first for bots, not agents. “Signed agents” read like a label added to a bot-centric system, not a first-class agent identity fabric. The design also centers Cloudflare as the arbiter and on-ramp, which is great for reliability inside their network and great for their business moat, but not great for an open, decentralized agentic web. While it builds on standards as the top poster notes, cloudflare's version is a business moat driven central registry service and nothing what the decentralized internet would/should look. i wrote a but more about this on my blog if someone care to read https://blog.agentcommunity.org/2025-08-23-web_auth_box_not_for_agents https://blog.agentcommunity.org/2025-08-23-web_auth_box_not_...
jimmydoe 1y ago
ActivityPub had sth similar? Maybe just reuse that to identify the source identity, then determine if you want to trust that domain or person/bot?
palmfacehn 1y ago
>3. Register your bot and key directory Register with CF is the specific part I object to. Of all of the numerous hazards here centralizing the registration with CF is most clearly problematic. This part of the spec could have easily been an additional header linking to key data.
- bobbiechen 1y ago
  Good news - this part of the spec is literally an additional header linking to key data: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-http-message-signatures-directory-01 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-http-mes... . Cloudflare is doing this registration as part of their "verified" program, which gives special treatment to bots/agents who go through the process. That's a Cloudflare-specific feature, not part of the spec.
  - palmfacehn 1y ago
    Nice catch. Even if we like the standard, the specific implementation can have problems. MSIE, extend and embrace are similar examples.

82 points by ananddtyagi 1y ago

Cloudflare's verified bots program is a terrible idea. They want to be the central chokepoint for agents, and they're doing it in shady ways like auto enrolling customers into blocking agents.

threatofrain 1y ago
That’s not shady, that’s awesome customer value! Bot blocking as Default option is a great choice for all of us.
- 1gn15 1y ago
  It's discriminatory against robots and helps make the web even more locked down. DRM never works; the analog hole is always the nuclear option. In the end, only people with non-mainstream browsers (or using VPN to escape country-level blocks, or Tor, or noJS) suffer. It's like how anti-piracy measures only affect paying customers, while pirates ironically get a better experience. The best way to get around endless CAPTCHAs is to just use LLMs instead.
  - threatofrain 1y ago
    > It's discriminatory against robots You would... lead your response with that argument? This has nothing to do with DRM. When people talk about how bots suck, the focus is on billion or trillion dollar businesses making everyone on the web pay. There's also a reason why the bot conversation flared up; we've always had bots, but before the conversation centered on Google and SEO. Now the conversation centers on companies like OpenAI.
  - johneth 1y ago
    > It's discriminatory against robots That's the entire point.

zb3 1y ago

Seems like Cloudflare wants to regulate the internet.. they should not have that power.

kylehotchkiss 1y ago
Disagree. Not everybody wants their sites scraped and their content used to train a model that they'll never see a penny from. Cloudflare is the only party who wants to build a system where both the models and individual sites have their interests respected.
- ATechGuy 1y ago
  Are you sure that CF can stop AI bots?
  - hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
    Do you have a better alternative?
    - ATechGuy 1y ago
      Have you looked into open-source alternatives? I'm assuming that it's a pressing problem for you, and you have already explored alternatives.
      - tick_tock_tick 1y ago
        I have, sadly they are basically worthless and often worse then worthless as they negatively impact the site.
        ATechGuy 1y ago
        Interesting. Care to list them here so that we all can learn.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago

bobbiechen 1y ago

I disagree with the other top-level comments at the moment: I believe Web Bot Auth is a useful and non-centralized emerging standard for self-identifying bots and agents. This press release today is a better statement of _why_ this feature exists (as opposed to the submission link, which is nuts-and-bolts of implementing): https://blog.cloudflare.com/signed-agents/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/signed-agents/ Web Bot Auth is a way for bots to self-identify cryptographically. Unlike the user agent header (which is trivially spoofed) or known IPs (painful to manage), Web Bot Auth uses HTTP Message Signatures using the bot's key, which should be published at some well-known location. This is a good thing! We want bots to be able to self-identify in a way that can't be impersonated. This gives website operators the power to allow or deny well-behaved bots with precision. It doesn't change anything about bots who try to hide their identity, who are not going to self-identify anyways. It's worth reading the proposal on the details: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-web-bot-auth-architecture https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-web-bot-... . Nothing about this is limited to Cloudflare. I'm also working on support for Web Bot Auth for our Agent Identification project at Stytch https://www.isagent.dev https://www.isagent.dev . Well-behaved bots benefit from this self-identification because it enables a better Agent Experience: https://stytch.com/blog/introducing-is-agent/ https://stytch.com/blog/introducing-is-agent/

binarymax 1y ago
I agree in principle, but I disagree that it should be designed and mandated by a private gatekeeper
- jacobn 1y ago
  Isn't that how most web standards got their start? One of the interested parties pushed something, then things evolved through the standards process? (And then it can of course get derailed, but that's a separate story)
- jrochkind1 1y ago
  What's now at the top has links to IETF drafts in the first paragraph. What am I missing? A way to authenticate identity for crawlers so I can allow-list ones I want to get in, exempt them from turnstile/captcha, etc -- is something I need. I'm not following what makes this controversial. Cryptographic verification of identity for web requests, sounds right.

realityfactchex 1y ago

No offense, but screw CloudFlare, screw their captchas for humans, and screw their wedging themselves between web operators and web users. They can offer what they want for bots. But stop ruining the experience for humans first.

tick_tock_tick 1y ago
> screw their wedging themselves between web operators and web users Web operators choose to use them; hell they even pay Cloudflare to be between them. Seriously I just think you don't understand how bad it is to run a site without someone in-front of it.
- mcspiff 1y ago
  Couldn’t agree more — Much like running my own DNS or email server, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to running my own website directly on the internet. It’s just not worth the hassle. For stuff only I use, it sits behind my VPN. For anything that _must_ be public, it’s going behind a WAF someone else can run.
- immibis 1y ago
  They don't have to, but they're tricked into doing so. Via marketing.
  - acdha 1y ago
    I miss the 90s, too, but these days anyone who wants to deal with current levels of bot traffic is probably going to look at a service like Cloudflare as much cheaper than the amount of ops time they’d otherwise spend keeping things up and secure.
    - immibis 1y ago
      You could just, like, not make a website that takes several seconds to handle each request. I let bots hit Gitea 2-3 times per second on a $10/month VPS, and the only actual problem was that it doesn't seem to ever delete zip snapshots, filling up the disk when enough snapshot links are clicked. So I disabled that feature by setting the snapshots folder read-only. There were no other problems. I mention Gitea because people complain about having to protect Gitea a lot, for some reason.

nerdsniper 1y ago

Why use a "web bot" instead of an API? Either can be driven by an AI "agent"...but this just seems like an "API key for a visual api interface", and rather wasteful in cost and resources. If a company could afford to pay a partner for an API key they wouldn't need this. If they can't afford to pay the partner for access -- they'd still be blocked with or without "Web Bot Auth". I don't understand what this is for. I suspect I'm missing something, what am I missing?

observationist 1y ago
Part of it, at least, is people thinking they've solved some perceived problem and being told by their chatbot that it's a terrific, brilliant new innovation and they should build a whole new protocol spec for it.
notatoad 1y ago
if you already have an api that exposes all the information that your parter who is willing to pay for an API key wants, then sure, that's perfect. but what if you don't have an API, or your API doesn't expose the information that crawlers are looking for? they want to crawl your website, they're willing to pay for the ability to crawl your website, but you don't want to build an API... i'm sure the next step here will be a cloudflare product that sits in front of your website and blocks all bot traffic except for the bots that are verified to have paid for access. (or maybe that already exists?)
mediaman 1y ago
The website the human sees is the new API. That's needed because many APIs are either nonexistent or extremely marginal in design and content coverage.

cuuupid 1y ago

Cloudflare is the last party that should be running this for two reasons. 1. THey have already proven to be a bad faith actor with their "DDoS protection." 2. This is pretty much the typical Cloudflare HN playbook. They release soemthing targeted at the current wave and hide behind an ideological barrier; meanwhile if you try to use them for anything serious they require a call with sales who jumps you with absurdly high pricing. Do other cloud providers charge high fees for things they have no business charging for? Absolutely. But they typically tell you upfront and don't run ideological narratives. This is not a company we should be putting much trust in, especially not with their continued plays to become the gatekeepers of the internet.

esseph 1y ago
Have you seen large cloud provider billing????? There is a whole segment of tech designed around helping you understand and manage cloud costs, through consultations, automations, etc. It has spawned companies and career paths!
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
  Ime, cloud cost centres are intentionally confusing and annoying. I get emails telling me to check their dashboard for billing info which I inevitably never do. It’s designed that way.
- cuuupid 1y ago
  Yes but they don’t hide that behind ideological nonsense, they own up to it. They’re a good faith actor with a high price tag
tick_tock_tick 1y ago
1) how so? Pretty much everything they do for DDoS protection is at their customers choice. You might not like what people want for their site but lets not pretend that most companies aren't very happy with it. 2) Then don't use them? Either they provide enough value to pay them or they don't.

mtrovo 1y ago

As much as I understand this is needed it rubs me the wrong way. The standard looks fine as a distributed protocol until you have to register to pay a rent to Cloudflare, which they say will eventually trickle down into publishers pocket but you know what having a middleman this powerful means to the power dynamics of the market. Publishers have a really bad hand no matter what we do to save them, content as we know it will have to adapt. Give it a couple more iterations and some MBA will come up with the brilliant idea of introducing an internet toll to humans and selling a content bundle with unlimited access to websites.

tick_tock_tick 1y ago
There is just too much spam and it's not clear that is a solvable problem without Cloudflare (or some other similar service). Maybe if they get big enough the incentives to spam will vanish and non Cloudflare sites can exist in peace (at-least until enough people leave Cloudflare that spam become profitable again).
maxwellg 1y ago
Cloudflare is only the first to market with a solution. If this proposal catches on every WAF vendor under the sun will have it implemented before the next sales cycle. Enforcement of this standard will be commoditized down to nothing.

jithinraj 1y ago

Web Bot Auth solves authentication (“who is this bot?”) but not authorization/usage control. We still need a machine-readable policy layer so sites can express “what this bot may do, under which terms” (purpose limits, retention, attribution, optional pricing) at a well-known path, robots.txt-like, but enforceable via signatures. A practical flow: 1. Bot self-identifies (Web Bot Auth) 2. Fetch policy 3. Accept terms or negotiate (HTTP 402 exists) 4. Present a signed receipt proving consent/payment 5. Origin/CDN verifies receipt and grants access That keeps things decentralized: identity is transport; policy stays with the site; receipts provide auditability, no single gatekeeper required. There’s ongoing work in this direction (e.g., PEAC using /.well-known/peac.txt) that aims to pair Web Bot Auth with site-controlled terms and verifiable receipts. Disclosure: I work on PEAC, but the pattern applies regardless of implementation.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

URL should be blog post: The age of agents: cryptographically recognizing agent traffic https://blog.cloudflare.com/signed-agents/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/signed-agents/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45052276)

bgwalter 1y ago

Cloudflare is playing both sides: grok.com is served by Cloudflare.

immibis 1y ago
Famously, a lot of DDoS-for-hire providers were served by Cloudflare. CF has a strong interest in making sure you can always get DDoSed.

hoppp 1y ago

I like that parsable signature in the http message however I dont quite understand how the system differentiates between human users and an llm agent controlling a browser

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

egorfine 1y ago

I will employ every tool in my toolbox in different ways before I bend to this. Especially before I bend to cloudflare.

nembal 1y ago

Web Bot Auth solves a real problem with a real standard. Per-request signatures make automated traffic accountable, and that is the right long-term primitive. In Cloudflare’s hands, the current implementation is built first for bots, not agents. “Signed agents” read like a label added to a bot-centric system, not a first-class agent identity fabric. The design also centers Cloudflare as the arbiter and on-ramp, which is great for reliability inside their network and great for their business moat, but not great for an open, decentralized agentic web. While it builds on standards as the top poster notes, cloudflare's version is a business moat driven central registry service and nothing what the decentralized internet would/should look. i wrote a but more about this on my blog if someone care to read https://blog.agentcommunity.org/2025-08-23-web_auth_box_not_for_agents https://blog.agentcommunity.org/2025-08-23-web_auth_box_not_...

jimmydoe 1y ago

ActivityPub had sth similar? Maybe just reuse that to identify the source identity, then determine if you want to trust that domain or person/bot?

palmfacehn 1y ago

>3. Register your bot and key directory Register with CF is the specific part I object to. Of all of the numerous hazards here centralizing the registration with CF is most clearly problematic. This part of the spec could have easily been an additional header linking to key data.

bobbiechen 1y ago
Good news - this part of the spec is literally an additional header linking to key data: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-http-message-signatures-directory-01 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-http-mes... . Cloudflare is doing this registration as part of their "verified" program, which gives special treatment to bots/agents who go through the process. That's a Cloudflare-specific feature, not part of the spec.
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  Nice catch. Even if we like the standard, the specific implementation can have problems. MSIE, extend and embrace are similar examples.