Cloudflare’s Turnstile is its next CAPTCHA replacement to determine you’re human

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

Instead of presenting a visual puzzle to a user, Turnstile applies one of many browser challenges that it rotates through to look for human behavior, amping up the difficulty if a visitor exhibits “non-human behaviors.” Turnstile uses JavaScript-based challenges that read the web browser environment for signals that indicate there’s a person entering the site, cycling through tests like proof of work, proof of space, and probing for web APIs. It also utilizes machine learning models to compare previously successful challenges with new ones, speeding up the passing process.

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

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