Apeleg Blog

The traditional approach to human verification, CAPTCHAs, is facing significant challenges due to evolving bot technology and user dissatisfaction. These mechanisms, although once effective, are now becoming both inadequate and inconvenient, compromising security and posing privacy concerns. The emergence of Privacy Pass, a groundbreaking solution developed by Cloudflare, seeks to counter these issues. Functioning initially as a browser extension, Privacy Pass provides a platform for users to authenticate their humanity without compromising their privacy. The system works on HTTP protocols, giving users anonymous tokens for identity verification. The solution is now moving towards standardization for native browser support, addressing one of its former limitations. The process involves the user receiving a challenge, engaging in a protocol with the issuer, and then providing the token to the originating request. Although there are existing challenges, such as its dependence on specific vendors, Privacy Pass presents a promising solution to CAPTCHA-related problems, striking a balance between security, user experience, and privacy. With collaborations among researchers, industry leaders, and privacy advocates, Privacy Pass signifies a substantial leap forward in mitigating automated threats, thus redefining the future of online verification.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a critical component of cybersecurity, especially in business environments. IAM, in simple terms, is a framework of policies, practices and procedures to ensure that the right users have access to the right resources and systems at the right time. This article discusses IAM, its technical and business implications and how organisations can implement it to ensure secure and efficient access to their systems.

IDs in APIs and applications might be exploited to gain unauthorised access to other data or otherwise disclose information by means of various attacks, such as timing attacks and enumeration attacks. For instance, an attacker can use sequential IDs to guess the existence of IDs and perform enumeration attacks. Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) encryption and opaque IDs can be used as a means of neutralising these attacks.

The principles of progressive enhancement can be applied to client-side rendered pages (or any pages with client-side scripts) to ensure that no matter the capabilities of users’ browsers, an appropriate baseline interactivity is present.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is an attack in which an external site makes a request to another site on behalf of a user without consent. This attack often relies on an existing session on the target site, which the attacker hijacks for their own purposes. Various CSRF prevention and mitigation techniques exist such as the SameSite attribute, CSRF tokens and header validation.