[feature] proof of work scraper deterrence (#4043)

This adds a proof-of-work based scraper deterrence to GoToSocial's middleware stack on profile and status web pages. Heavily inspired by https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis, but massively stripped back for our own usecase.

Todo:
- ~~add configuration option so this is disabled by default~~
- ~~fix whatever weirdness is preventing this working with CSP (even in debug)~~
- ~~use our standard templating mechanism going through apiutil helper func~~
- ~~probably some absurdly small performance improvements to be made in pooling re-used hex encode / hash encode buffers~~ the web endpoints aren't as hot a path as API / ActivityPub, will leave as-is for now as it is already very minimal and well optimized
- ~~verify the cryptographic assumptions re: using a portion of token as challenge data~~ this isn't a serious application of cryptography, if it turns out to be a problem we'll fix it, but it definitely should not be easily possible to guess a SHA256 hash from the first 1/4 of it even if mathematically it might make it a bit easier
- ~~theme / make look nice??~~
- ~~add a spinner~~
- ~~add entry in example configuration~~
- ~~add documentation~~

Verification page originally based on https://github.com/LucienV1/powtect

Co-authored-by: tobi <tobi.smethurst@protonmail.com>
Reviewed-on: https://codeberg.org/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/pulls/4043
Reviewed-by: tobi <tsmethurst@noreply.codeberg.org>
Co-authored-by: kim <grufwub@gmail.com>
Co-committed-by: kim <grufwub@gmail.com>
This commit is contained in:
kim
2025-04-28 20:12:27 +00:00
committed by kim
parent 2b82fa7481
commit d8c4d9fc5a
16 changed files with 759 additions and 19 deletions

View File

@ -10,8 +10,6 @@ You can allow or disallow crawlers from collecting stats about your instance fro
The AI scrapers come from a [community maintained repository][airobots]. It's manually kept in sync for the time being. If you know of any missing robots, please send them a PR!
A number of AI scrapers are known to ignore entries in `robots.txt` even if it explicitly matches their User-Agent. This means the `robots.txt` file is not a foolproof way of ensuring AI scrapers don't grab your content.
If you want to block these things fully, you'll need to block based on the User-Agent header in a reverse proxy until GoToSocial can filter requests by User-Agent header.
A number of AI scrapers are known to ignore entries in `robots.txt` even if it explicitly matches their User-Agent. This means the `robots.txt` file is not a foolproof way of ensuring AI scrapers don't grab your content. In addition to this you might want to look into blocking User-Agents via [requester header filtering](request_filtering_modes.md), and enabling a proof-of-work [scraper deterrence](scraper_deterrence.md).
[airobots]: https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt/