Forget IPs: Using Cryptography to Verify Bot and Agent Traffic in the Age of AI

Описание: #ThisWeekinNET — Episode 95

In this episode, host João Tomé is joined in Cloudflare’s Lisbon office by our Senior Research Engineer Thibault Meunier to explore a new proposal that could reshape how bots interact with the web in the age of AI.

⏱️ Timestamps:
02:19 Thibault’s role at Cloudflare in the Research team
02:50 Why Cloudflare is proposing that bots use cryptographic signatures
04:20 How content creators can benefit from this protocol in the AI age
07:00 Feedback from AI companies like OpenAI
09:40 Changes in the type of crawling happening online
11:00 Feedback from content creators
15:30 Why these changes are happening now
20:00 How user agents can be spoofed: current trust assumptions about bots
21:48 Comparison with post-quantum cryptography protocols and adoption
24:00 How long it may take for the protocol to start making a difference
25:27 Can this proposal help prevent abuse and attacks
27:13 Use cases and the culture of the Research team at Cloudflare
29:30 An underrated protocol
32:00 MCP protocol

We go into Cloudflare’s proposal of using cryptographic signatures for bots, enabling websites to verify their identity. Why is this important? As AI systems rely increasingly on online content, this standard could help build a better relationship between content creators and AI platforms.

To wrap up, Principal Engineer Kevin Guthrie walks us through the blog post “Performance measurements… and the people who love them”, which explores how teams can better measure, visualize, and communicate web performance, beyond raw metrics.

🔗 Watch more episodes on our show page: cloudflare.tv/ThisWeekInNET

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