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Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

https://hacktivis.me/articles/cloudflare-turnstile-webgl-fingerprinting
72•HypnoticOcelot•1h ago

Comments

nulledy•47m ago
As turnstile users on several of our sites, I think we need to revisit that decision.
sammy2255•26m ago
Out of curiosity, why did you have it on in the first place?
kykat•42m ago
What? Big tech company is evil? No way! I thought cloudflare were good guys...
aboardRat4•29m ago
Big tech companies are always visited first by the G-men who need something done.
aleksandrm•25m ago
What gave you the impression that Cloudflare were the good guys?
tardedmeme•14m ago
Probably everyone on HN singing their praises for the past 10 years.
Fokamul•35m ago
Please, anyone from EU (US is doomed rofl) create a petition to ban browser-fingerprinting in EU, across all existing browsers.

I'm not good at creating petitions but can happily sign it. Also with stop killing games and anti-chat control.

I can imagine this can get a traction, if it's explained in youtube video to "normal" people.

koolala•25m ago
a. Accept All

b. Accept Only Necessary Fingerprinting

fidotron•21m ago
A better solution would be to make webgl, webgpu and (especially) webrtc have some sort of prompt before they can be in any way used in that fashion, but this will absolutely destroy web ux Windows Vista style.
richwater•11m ago
You mean the "Accept Cookies" banner that has become a complete joke? Pass
anonym29•30m ago
Say no to malware - say no to Cloudflare
malka1986•27m ago
Thanks, i did not know about `privacy.resistfingerprinting`

I'll make sure to fail all cloudflare turnshit in the future.

gruez•16m ago
I have it enabled and turnstile works fine.
Wowfunhappy•26m ago
...in the age of AI, does anyone have an actual solution for keeping out bots while preserving the privacy of humans?

Obviously this is terrible, but I think there's a possibility it's the least terrible option? Another option is IP reputation, which I think is worse. Or scanning a code with a non-rooted phone, which I think is even worse than that!

fidotron•23m ago
> ...in the age of AI, does anyone have an actual solution for keeping out bots while preserving the privacy of humans?

There isn't one, and pretending otherwise is nonsense because humans will always provide their credentials to something to act on their behalf.

In the limit you end up with Chinese phone farms.

tardedmeme•14m ago
Right. Botnet operators love cloudflare because they make so much money renting out compromised machines to pass their tests.
malka1986•22m ago
> keeping out bot

You can forget about it. It is not possible. Simple as that.

Wowfunhappy•19m ago
Let's say I'm selling concert tickets. How do I prevent bots from buying up all the tickets and scalping them?
luckylion•17m ago
denysvitali•25m ago
Cloudflare is known to use fingerprinting to detect scrapers For example, they use JA3 fingerprints and match them against the UA to block stuff like cURL while allowing OkHttp (Android clients) - but this can be easily be spoofed with packages such as CycleTLS [1].

I don't want to defend them, because they gate away a good chunk of the internet with their "bot protection", but unless you do PoW (which is also ecologically a nightmare), probably fingerprinting is the way to go - completely destroying the privacy of everyone involved.

Cromite, a privacy conscious fork of Chromium for Android, has constantly issues with CloudFlare Turnstile [2] because they (Cloudflare) try to fingerprint it in multiple ways in order to pass the challenge. The only way to get it to work would be to join the CloudFlare Browser Developer program - which requires signing an NDA. Rightfully so, the project maintainer didn't want to do it.

If you want to see the extent of what CloudFlare does to fingerprint the browsers, just have a look in the issue [2] and see which flags need to be disabled in order to allow CloudFlare to pass the challenge.

I understand both sides, but at least CloudFlare could be flexible enough to fall back to PoW instead of just blocking people from sending forms or accessing websites...

[1]: https://github.com/Danny-Dasilva/CycleTLS

[2]: https://github.com/uazo/cromite/issues/2365

adamtaylor_13•14m ago
So if you need to prevent bot abuse, but also don't want an ugly captcha every time someone goes to sign up, is there a better option?
avallach•7m ago
Doesn't this mean we just need to make the webgl fingerprint resistance implementation smarter? Instead of explicitly rejecting webgl access or responding with dummy data, respond with data that is random within space of N common and reproducible patterns. E.g. emulate webgl implementation of some low spec but actually popular devices.
gruez•5m ago
This blog post is terrible.

>Turns out it's because Cloudflare wants to have a fingerprint of your device via WebGL, the only reason for doing this would be tracking.

> So Cloudflare just banned all WebKitGTK browsers as I guess they put an exception for Safari.

This is false. I ran firefox with:

* hardware acceleration disabled (so software renderer, nothing to fingerprint)

* resistfingerprinting enabled, including letterboxing with default window size

* webgl disabled

* VPN enabled

* In a Windows VM

By all accounts this should be the most suspicious fingerprint ever, but turnstile happily lets me through. My guess is that OP's browser is getting banned because his WebKitGTK has a weird fingerprint, not because of webgl or whatever.

> Such things are blocked in WebKit, and have been for years. Meaning it's tracking so awful that even Apple would block it, and as far as I can tell it's not the kind of privacy protection you can easily disable in it.

This is false. Webgl fingerprinting works just fine on Safari. They might try to mitigate it by adding some noise, but that's not so different than what firefox does, and is certainly not "blocked".

Tie them to the buyer's identity, offer at-value buy-backs until X weeks before event, disallow resale.
MyMemoryfails•8m ago
I'd simply check filling speed, even with browser's autocomplete humans are slow due needing click submit.

Then when it's "processing", do them in bulk and prioritize slower users. There's huge opportunity do bot checks after checkout without affecting user experience.

Also on product launches you could add unique field which requires user to input, for example that way bots can't prepare for launches.

cr125rider•15m ago
And identifying a bot that is acting on my behalf. Claude go search this topic is basically the same as Googling something and clicking on the results. Human driven AI searching needs to be in a different box than AI scraping for training data.

Which sounds extremely difficult to differentiate

doctorpangloss•12m ago
web environment integrity
csomar•12m ago
They are not a problem unless you "believe" it is a problem. I estimate around 20-25K hits to my website from bots per day and I have all cloudflare protections disabled. Any decently optimized server should be able to easily handle that. (it's roughly 1 request every 3 seconds).
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Private invite only internets

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Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL

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