by jrochkind1 | 2025-08-30 14:11:43+00:00
> The same is true online. A cryptographic signature that claims “I am acting on behalf of X” means nothing unless it is tied to something real, like a verifiable infrastructure or a range of IPs. Without that, I can simply hand the passport to another agent, and they can act as if they were me. The passport becomes nothing more than a token anyone can pass around.

Well, that's true of any crytpographic key?

In this case, it would mean you are giving them permission to act on your behalf. Nothing wrong with that.

If some of the people acting on your behalf start acting maliciously, then presumably those who decided to trust the people who were acting on your behalf would stop doing so.

Is this not common to how most any digital authentication works at all? You can always share your keys. That's a feature not a bug, when the actor you want to identify is meant to have a distributed implementation.

I understand the concern about how much power CloudFlare has, how they have the ability to gatekeep a large part of the internet. Absolutely, this is alarming.

But the Web Both Auth protocol itself is not the problem -- it seems to me to be written and designed appropriately for authentication of automated web agents.

And I think we desperately need something for that. I, like many people, are being forced to put bot precautions in place, because otherwise my sites are overwhelmed. But this means I wind up blocking bots that I don't want to block too. Because they are are partners, because I approve of what they are doing, becuase they have demonstrated good behavior. I have no way to do that right now.

IP address ranges are absolutely not the right way. IP addresses are network topology, not authentication. i worked in academia for some time, where large unviersities have a history of trying to use IP addresses for authentication -- and even working with internal IP addresses theoretically controlled by the (large) institution, it was a fool's game. IP addresses can change all the time -- even for a device which has not moved it's physical location. Plus resources can be allocated to different physical locations. Different actors can share an IP address. They are often changed at various lower levels of hiearchical administration without informing the top, for network topological concerns -- they are designed for this. Etc etc etc.

I understand the concern about CloudFlare's gatekeeping monopoly.

There may be ways that Web Both Auth can make it worse. Discussion of that is not inappropriate. Maybe there are ways to ameliorate it (will individual customers be ablet o have their own allow-lists? Can we insist on that? Is that enough?). Maybe not good enough. But let's focus the discussion on that -- there is in fact nothing wrong with Web Both Auth protocol, at least nothing covered in this essay, it is well-designed for authenticating bot agents, and we actually do need something that does that, in the current world where misbehaving disguised bot agents have become a real problem.

Not having a way to authenticate distributed bot actors who wish to opt in to a way to be authenticated (everyone else is free to try to evade the bot detectors same as they are now?) -- is going to create more damage. All these people railing against what seems to be an appropriate protocol for authentication because they don't like Cloudflare's monopoly are distressing me, it's going to be worse if we don't have a way to do it. It is an open protocol not just for use by cloudflare.