Learn how to improve bot management with Google Cloud Armor and reCAPTCHA. Our Google Cloud Support team is here to help you with your questions and concerns.

Optimize Bot Management with Google Cloud Armor and reCAPTCHA

In today’s world, protecting our web applications from automated threats is vital.

Fortunately, Google Cloud Armor and reCAPTCHA offer tools to help us evaluate and act on incoming requests. This makes sure that our application is secure against malicious bots.

What is Google Cloud Armor

Google Cloud Armor is a cloud-based web application firewall (WAF) service that acts as a protective shield for our web application. It filters incoming traffic to prevent harmful requests from reaching the servers.

What is reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA, developed by Google, uses advanced risk analysis techniques to differentiate between human users and automated clients.

By analyzing user interactions and other risk factors, reCAPTCHA offers an encrypted token that represents the associated risk level.

How They Work Together

When an incoming request reaches our web application, Google Cloud Armor takes the first step in analyzing it. This involves checking for indicators of automated behavior, like suspicious IP addresses, unusual request patterns, or the absence of human-like cookies.

Then, Google Cloud Armor triggers a reCAPTCHA challenge based on the analysis. This challenge ranges from a simple checkbox to more complex tasks like image recognition.

If the user successfully completes the challenge, Cloud Armor recognizes the request as legitimate and allows it to proceed. So, if the challenge is failed or ignored, the request is flagged as potentially malicious.

Furthermore, in case of failure, Cloud Armor can take predefined actions.

Actions Cloud Armor Can Take

• Blocking:

  It blocks the request, preventing access to our application.
• Rate Limiting:

  Throttles the rate of requests from specific IP addresses or sources identified as bots.
• Always Challenge:

  For high-risk resources, we can configure Cloud Armor to present a reCAPTCHA challenge, adding an extra security layer.

How to Implement Google Cloud Armor and reCAPTCHA

We have to configure a security policy rule within Google Cloud Armor to redirect requests for a reCAPTCHA assessment. Our experts recommend creating and associating our own reCAPTCHA WAF site key with our security policy. So, this ensures that only users who pass the reCAPTCHA manual challenge can proceed.

Furthermore, we can enforce frictionless assessments based on the risk level assigned by reCAPTCHA for a more seamless user experience. By configuring security policy rules to evaluate reCAPTCHA tokens, we can filter traffic effectively.

Also, action-tokens and session-tokens from reCAPTCHA can be used on websites and mobile applications to boost this process.

A few additional capabilities of Google Cloud Armor bot management include:

• Redirect (302):

  Redirect suspicious requests to an alternative URL by configuring an HTTP 302 response.
• Decorate Requests:

  Insert custom headers into requests before they reach our backend systems.

Benefits of Using Google Cloud Armor & reCAPTCHA

• When we combine Cloud Armor’s initial screening with reCAPTCHA’s risk analysis, we can block malicious bots attempting account takeovers, content scraping, or denial-of-service attacks.
• Additionally, by analyzing a variety of factors, Cloud Armor minimizes the chances of mistakenly challenging legitimate users.
• Also, we can easily configure security policies within Cloud Armor to use reCAPTCHA challenges for certain resources in our web application.

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Conclusion

In brief, our Support Experts demonstrated how to improve bot management with Google Cloud Armor and reCAPTCHA