What is a CAPTCHA?
CAPTCHAs are a security measure that helps verify a user is human (not a bot) when they are attempting to access an application or system. The user is presented with an interactive challenge of distorted letters and numbers that are intentionally difficult to decipher, and then prompted to enter them in the correct case and order, before they can proceed.
What is a reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a service provided by Google that “helps protect websites from spam and abuse”. It is essentially a simpler version of a traditional CAPTCHA. It requires less user input and sometimes none at all. In place of a text re-entry prompt, users must either click a simple checkbox verifying they are “not a robot”. In other instances, they need do nothing at all - websites will denote the use of a reCAPTCHA on the login page but not require any user input or activity. reCAPTCHA is smart enough to monitor user behavior to determine whether it is a bot or a human.
How do CAPTCHAs work?
CAPTCHAs work by presenting a human user with a challenge that a bot would be unable to satisfy. Users are presented with distorted, stretched, or inverted letters and numbers and then prompted to type them into a text field and submit. Until a user has successfully entered text matching the CAPTCHA image, they are unable to proceed to the desired page (this could be a login, a checkout page, or anything containing more sensitive information).
For a long time, bots have lacked the ability to interpret the warped text, and are therefore blocked from accessing pages protected by CAPTCHAs. With the introduction of AI, however, bots are becoming sophisticated enough to defeat CAPTCHAs, making the death of CAPTCHAs for real users inevitable.
How Effective are CAPTCHAs?
Until the introduction of AI, CAPTCHAs have been very effective at keeping bots out… so effective in fact, that they’ve often kept legitimate human users out. While this is great for security concerns, it has introduced user frustrations and unwanted friction to user experience. This is further compounded by those with accessibility challenges. This was improved by reCAPTCHA, but still poses a challenge for certain users.
Often too, a reCAPTCHA won’t function properly and a user will be forced to satisfy a traditional CAPTCHA anyway.
What alternative solutions are there to protect against bots?
Bot management tools quickly identify and mitigate unwanted bot activity, protecting your applications against a variety of automated attacks. They use intelligent bot detection technology to understand your traffic and make informed decisions, without the need for CAPTCHAs.
The Future of Bot Management
Fastly’s Bot Management feature, Dynamic Challenges, helps you automatically and intelligently adjust your level of protection based on real-time analysis of incoming traffic. For suspected bot traffic, the Dynamic Challenges serves it a challenge it will be incapable of solving (a CAPTCHA!)
Dynamic Challenges is fully integrated with Private Access Tokens (PATs), so anyone it validates won’t get any challenge at all. Dynamic Challenges removes the need for balance and delivers the optimal solution for end users.
