Cloudflare’s Turnstile is its next CAPTCHA replacement for determining you’re human

Turnstile is advertised as “a user-friendly, privacy-preserving alternative” to CAPTCHA. According to a press release, it will remove interactive challenges used to verify people, which Cloudflare says normally take an average of 32 seconds, and reduce the entire process to one second.

Instead of presenting a visual puzzle to a user, Turnstile applies one of several browser challenges it spins to look for human behavior, increasing the difficulty if a visitor exhibits “non-human behavior”. Turnstile uses JavaScript-based challenges that read the web browser’s environment for signals that someone is entering the site, traversing tests such as proof-of-work, proof-of-space, and search. Web APIs. It also uses machine learning models to compare previously successful challenges with new ones, speeding up the success process.

Although hardware keys can work well, they require users to always have access to them. So the company has also created a version that can “ask” a trusted device (smartphone or otherwise) if it is in fact not being operated by a bot.

Cloudflare’s Turnstile is now available in beta form, is free, and you also don’t need to use the company’s other web services or send your traffic through its network. The setup process is detailed on the Cloudflare website and involves replacing your current CAPTCHA JavaScript with one that calls the Turnstile API.