It takes humanity 500 years to enter a CAPTCHA every day

Cloudflare is a web security and network infrastructure giant headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA. Cloudflare is responsible for providing content delivery network services, DDoS mitigation, Internet security, and distributed domain name server services to many businesses and organizations around the world.

There is no need to talk more about Cloudflare’s influence on the internet, and the “good news” is that the company is really committed to its plan to “kill” CAPTCHAs.

“CAPTCHA” (short for “OLDperfectely Aautomated Ppublic BILLIONuring test to tell OLDomputers and Humans Apart”, is a type of question-and-answer test commonly used in the internet world to determine if the interacting object is a human. Online services are undisputed, but it also entails a series of related problems that make “benefit and disadvantage”.

According to Cloudflare’s own research, it takes an average of 32 seconds for each person to complete a CAPTCHA “challenge”. Currently, there are about 4.6 billion Internet users globally, and assuming that every typical Internet user has to enter a CAPTCHA every 10 days, very simple math shows that every day, humanity is waste the equivalent of 500 years just entering a CAPTCHA.

Talking about this, Thibault Meunier, senior research engineer at Cloudflare said in a blog post:

We are living in the second decade of the 21st century, and now should be the time to mark the end of silly verification requests like “select images related to fire hydrants, vehicles , traffic lights and the like… on the Internet. I mean CAPTCHA!

Cloudflare is launching an experiment aimed at ending this madness. We want to get rid of CAPTCHAs completely. The idea is pretty simple: a real real user can touch or look at their device to prove they’re human without revealing their identity. We want you to be able to prove that you’re human without having to follow silly, time-consuming requests.

We are starting to experiment with trusted USB authentication keys (like YubiKey) that have been around for a while, but also more and more phones and computers are equipped with this capability by default. .

To replace CAPTCHA, Cloudflare has developed a technology called “Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood” – it takes only about 5 seconds and requires up to three clicks to complete the authentication, instead of the 32 seconds it takes to resolve. CAPTCHA as usual. Cloudflare will start with trusted security keys – such as YubiKey, HyperFIDO, and Thetis FIDO U2F.

In fact, Cloudflare also switched from reCAPTCHA to hCAPTCHA last year when Google announced it would start charging for reCAPTCHA. However, Cloudflare’s long-term goal will be to completely decommission this aging technology.