I got into the self-hosting scene this year when I wanted to start up my own website run on old recycled thinkpad. A lot of time was spent learning about ufw, reverse proxies, header security hardening, fail2ban.
Despite all that I still had a problem with bots knocking on my ports spamming my logs. I tried some hackery getting fail2ban to read caddy logs but that didnt work for me. I nearly considered giving up and going with cloudflare like half the internet does. But my stubbornness for open source self hosting and the recent cloudflare outages this year have encouraged trying alternatives.
Coinciding with that has been an increase in exposure to seeing this thing in the places I frequent like codeberg. This is Anubis, a proxy type firewall that forces the browser client to do a proof-of-work security check and some other nice clever things to stop bots from knocking. I got interested and started thinking about beefing up security.
I’m here to tell you to try it if you have a public facing site and want to break away from cloudflare It was VERY easy to install and configure with caddyfile on a debian distro with systemctl. In an hour its filtered multiple bots and so far it seems the knocks have slowed down.
My botspam woes have seemingly been seriously mitigated if not completely eradicated. I’m very happy with tonights little security upgrade project that took no more than an hour of my time to install and read through documentation. Current chain is caddy reverse proxy -> points to Anubis -> points to services
Good place to start for install is here
Accessing the browsers API in any way is way harder to spoof than some hashing. I already suggested checking if the browser has graphics acceleration. That would filter out the vast majority of headless browsers too. PoW is just math and is easy to spoof without running any JavaScript. You can even do it faster than real JavaScript users something like Rust or C.
What are you talking about? It just refreshes the page without doing any of the extra computation that PoW does. What extra burden does it put on users?
If you check for GPU (not generally a bad idea) you will have the same people that currently complain about JS, complain about this breaking with their anti-fingerprinting browser addons.
But no, you can’t spoof PoW obviously, that’s the entire point of it. If you do the calculation in Javascript or not doesn’t really matter for it to work.
In the current shape Anubis has zero impact on usability for 99% of the site visitors, not so with meta refresh.