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Web Bot Auth

(developers.cloudflare.com)
81 points ananddtyagi | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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bobbiechen ◴[] No.45056701[source]
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/

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-... . 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 . Well-behaved bots benefit from this self-identification because it enables a better Agent Experience: https://stytch.com/blog/introducing-is-agent/

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binarymax ◴[] No.45056742[source]
I agree in principle, but I disagree that it should be designed and mandated by a private gatekeeper
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1. jacobn ◴[] No.45057629[source]
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)