User experience is the cornerstone of any successful online business. For developers, much of this boils down to application performance. A critical aspect of performance is latency: the time it takes for a system to respond to a user’s request. Apart from technical and scalability challenges, a robust bot protection strategy is needed to safeguard system response and performance.
Use Case: Bot Protection
Problem Statement
Bot attacks are a constant challenge for web applications. One of the problems with deploying a bot protection solution is the additional latency for human users. This happens due to overreliance on slow and costly server-to-server calls, which can significantly increase latency and degrade the user experience.
Realization Approach
To safeguard the user experience of web applications from bot management solutions, a decision engine is deployed to ensure secured ordered resource access that analyzes user behavior in real-time, identifying trusted users and minimizing the need for slow, resource-intensive server-side checks.
Solution Space
The result is a near 0 ms page-request impact for 85% of human website visitors. This method combines real-time behavioral analysis, optimized traffic routing, and adaptive detection to prioritize a fast online experience for real humans while making bots pay the latency price.
Featured Cyber Security Platform
HUMAN offers a cybersecurity platform that protects organizations by disrupting bot attacks, digital fraud and abuse. Their bot protection feature ensures complete client-side threat protection with trusted application environment where users feel safe to interact, login, and transact.
Bot attacks threaten user experience. They cause high latency, leading to frustration, decreased engagement, and ultimately, lost revenue. Malicious bots can wreak havoc on websites and applications, from scraping proprietary content to launching account takeover attacks to making fraudulent purchases with stolen credit cards. In today’s digital landscape, deploying a bot management solution is critical. But equally critical is ensuring that the solution does not add latency for human users. To detect and block bots, traditional bot management solutions frequently rely on slow and costly server-to-server calls, which can significantly increase latency.
HUMAN’s Low-latency Approach
HUMAN offers a unique approach to bot protection that prioritizes both security and user experience. It is backed by a patented technology that analyzes user behavior in real time, identifying trusted users and minimizing the need for slow, resource-intensive server-side checks. The result is 0ms page-request impact for 85% of human website visitors and <2ms page-request impact for 95% of requests. Meanwhile, bots experience higher, controlled latency.
The HUMAN platform analyzes every user interaction on a website, but only executes server-to-server calls for suspicious requests. The HUMAN decision engine continuously monitors user behavior, such as mouse movements, keystrokes, and click patterns, and continuously updates decisions accordingly. This enables the platform to identify trusted users and allow their requests to pass through HUMAN’s decision engine without server-side checks.Â
Here’s how it works:
- Requests that have been identified as a real human receive an encrypted token. This token is decrypted at the edge, bypassing the need for a server-to-server call and eliminating additional latency.
- As the user continues to browse the application, the signal is asynchronously re-evaluated to confirm that it is legitimate. This keeps latency to a minimum while ensuring detection accuracy.Â
- For highly sensitive actions (e.g., logging into an account), a full server-to-server call occurs.
The Benefits of HUMAN’s Approach
HUMAN combines real-time behavioral analysis, optimized traffic routing, and adaptive detection to prioritize a fast online experience for real humans while making bots pay the latency price. The solution yields several key benefits:
- Reduced latency. By minimizing server-to-server calls, HUMAN significantly reduces latency, resulting in faster page load times and improved user experience.
- Enhanced security. The platform’s robust detection capabilities effectively identify and block sophisticated bots, protecting your applications from a wide range of automated threats, including account takeover, scraping, and carding.
- Scalability. HUMAN’s global network and efficient architecture can handle massive traffic spikes, ensuring optimal performance under heavy load.
Global PoPs Network
HUMAN protects some of the largest online businesses in the world with a robust network of global points of presence (PoPs) across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. New locations are established regularly to enable customers to respond quickly to evolving threats and reduce latency for end users.
HUMAN’s patented technology optimizes both detection and performance, which preserves your user experience. Using encrypted cookies to identify trusted users minimizes the need for server-to-server calls, and every interaction is analyzed to continuously update decisions without server-side checks. This streamlined process reduces latency and minimizes dependency on the PoPs network in-and-of itself, ensuring superior user experience without compromising detection accuracy.
This post was originally published in Human.
