How does “I am not a Robot”, work?
The inner working of Google’s reCaptcha!
So I am pretty sure that while filling up any online form you must have come across the following image. Ever thought about how will the system know that I am not a bot just by one click?
So this is not unusual many people must have doubted this, even I did until I came to know about the fact. So I decided to research this topic that how the hell it works and thought of sharing it with all my lovely readers.
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Why Captcha is required for the application?
Let us suppose, we have a signup page on our application, and some mischief character tries to play with our application.
Normally we are expecting that uses will be registering on our application to use our services. But these hackers can easily find a loophole in it. They can simply run a normal script and register millions of users within hours.
Now imagine how much load this will cause on your service and will increase the size of a database. Of course, you don’t want to lose new users which are registered by a robot.
A similar issue was faced by various website owners, so of course there was something that needs to be done and the invention of such capture came into place.
Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Captcha helps in telling our application that the form filling is done by Humans or Robots.
History
Back in 1997 the version 1 of captcha was a set of the distorted images containing characters and numbers with humans was supposed to guess correctly which tells the system that the person filling the form is a human.
But there comes many such innovations in the process, for example guessing the image but it was also not very smooth. Many people with disabilities and regular users complaint that it was wasting their time since getting the text was sometimes very difficult.
So there comes the invention of Recaptcha which was as simple as clicking the checkbox and confirming that you aren’t a robot.
Introduction to Recaptcha
So as we have already discussed with the invention of Recaptcha, has saved the users from the hustle of guessing the distorted text and images.
Recaptcha is owned by Google and is said to be used more than a hundred million times. The users are saved from the hustle of not reading those hard-to-read characters.
Only when the system doubts if the user could be a robot then only they are shown with the images and puzzles to solve.
Around 2013 Recaptcha tells the system if the user is a robot or bot analyzing largely available data of user interaction with the browser. Recaptcha is free of cost and available to use for everyone.
Benefits of using Recaptcha.
Recaptcha helps your website protect from that robot, which can put undue pressure on your application by running the script. The entire protection has become frictionless since the user does not need to struggle a lot to prove that they aren’t a Robot.
A legitimate user can make purchases, log in and perform activity as per the flow without any hustle.
As per the official Site, Click to read more
Proven
reCAPTCHA has been at the forefront of bot mitigation for over a decade and actively protects data for our network of five million sites.
Frictionless
A seamless fraud detection service that stops bots and other automated attacks while approving valid users.
Adaptive
reCAPTCHA’s risk-based bot algorithms apply continuous machine learning that factors in every customer and bot interaction to overcome the binary heuristic logic of traditional challenge-based bot detection technologies.
Although Recaptcha is free to use for all there is also an enterprise version available which contains a hell of a lot of features. If you are an enthusiast you can play around with the basic version. But for bigger use cases try considering the paid plans as well.
On their official website, you can find the proper documentation about all the available versions, based upon your use case explore it more. Click to reach.
Final Thoughts
So after reading the article you must have got the use, that is why many popular websites show you a check stating that I am not a robot.
Next time whenever you will be encountering another such checkbox, it won't irritate you since now you are aware of the intention and the reason behind such checkboxes confirming you are not a robot.
So probably if you are a website owner consider subscribing to ReCaptcha this will help you in avoiding various attacks from Hackers. It will be a big favor from you to your servers and the application won't go down due to such attacks.
About The Author
Apoorv Tomar is the Software developer and founder of Mindroast. You can connect with him on Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram. Subscribe to the newsletter for the latest curated content.
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