76 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
76 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Say hello to mCaptcha"
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description: "Introducing mCaptcha, a kickass CAPTCHA systems that gives (DDoS) attackers a run for their money. Oh and UX is great too!"
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lead: "We are mCaptcha. We build kickass CAPTCHA systems that give (DDoS) attackers a run for their money. And we do all of this without tracking your users. Oh and did I mention our UX is great?"
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date: 2021-05-26
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lastmod: 2021-05-26
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draft: false
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weight: 50
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images: ["icon.png"]
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contributors: ["Aravinth Manivannan"]
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---
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At mCaptcha, we believe in digital freedom and privacy and so we built a
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[proof-of-work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work) based
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CAPTCHA system that doesn't track. Seriously, no tracking. But that
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isn't the killer feature, our system doesn't require the user to
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pick cars or ID sidewalks --- our system does it's thing(usually
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at the click of a button) and gets out of the way.
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## How does it work?
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mCaptcha uses SHA256 based proof-of-work(PoW) to rate limit users.
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When a user wants to do something on an mCaptcha-protected website,
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1. they will have to generate proof-of-work(a bunch of math that will
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takes time to compute) and submit it to mCaptcha.
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2. We'll validate the proof:
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- if validation is unsuccessful, they will be prevented from accessing
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the destination website
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- if validation is successful, read on,
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3. They will be issued a token that should be submit along with the
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request/form to the destination website.
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4. The destination website validates the submitted token with
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mCaptcha before processing the request.
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The whole process is automated from the user's point of view. All they
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have to do is click on a button to initiate the process.
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## Okay, but what about bad actors?
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mCaptcha makes interacting with websites (computationally)expensive for
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the user. A well-behaving user will experience a slight delay(no delay
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when under moderate load to 2-3 seconds when under attack; PoW difficulty is
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variable) but if someone wants to hammer your site, they will have to do
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more work to send requests than your server you will have to do to respond
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to their request.
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## Why use mCaptcha?
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- **Free software, privacy focused**
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- **Seamless** UX --- No more annoying CAPTCHAs!
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- **IP address independent:** your users are behind a NAT? We got you covered!
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- **Automatic bot throttling**
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- **Resistant to replay attacks:** proof-of-work configurations have short lifetimes(30s) and can be used only once. If a user submits a PoW to an already used configuration or an expired one, their proof will be rejected.
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## How to migrate?
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Our client libraries are mostly compatible with reCAPTCHA and hCaptcha.
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A detailed guide will be published soon.
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## Our Philosophy
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Man has has come so far only because our ancestors chose to
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share their knowledge with others. If everything was labeled
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intellectual property, we might still be stuck in Stone Age. The idea of
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intellectual property is alien to us. For this reason, all of our source
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code is freely available(both as in freedom and beers) at [our
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GitHub](https://github.com/mCaptcha/).
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## Resources
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- [guard](https://github.com/mCaptcha/guard) - mCaptcha backend `AGPL`
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- [frontend library](https://github.com/mCaptcha/browser) - mCaptcha frontend library. `MIT/APACHE`
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