Bot… or Not?

Reclaim your identity by reclaiming your data

Data is the fuel of the modern economy. As more and more people take control of their data with Datawallet, and reap the benefits of that data’s use, they’ll truly appreciate that metaphor — because data has a powerful ability to make your life easier and more prosperous.

For that reason, we are excited to announce one of the first Datawallet applications to make your life easier — our Bot or Not service. Bot or Not will let you prove your digital identity more easily and more reliably than the current labor-intensive methods that require you to fill in forms, receive and respond to email or text verifications, or complete CAPTCHAs. By simply having a Datawallet profile with multiple data-sources connected, and permissioning that data to be privately and securely analyzed, you can automatically receive and share proof that you aren’t a bot. Datawallet is able to prove you are a human because a bot’s internet usage and data-trails are vastly different from that of a real person. We provide this proof automatically based upon your Datawallet in a completely privacy-preserving manner.

Bot fraud significantly impedes trust, security, and the proper functioning of services on the blockchain and the internet. To tackle this issue within the crypto community, we are first launching Bot or Not on-chain with the help of Enigma’s Trusted Execution Environments. At the same time, we’re developing tools to create interoperability between the Datawallet platform and current internet protocols, allowing Bot or Not (and other Datawallet-based services and apps) to work across the digital world.

Motivation

Bots account for about half of web traffic, more than half of bot traffic is from bad bots (1), and the vast majority of these bad bots are so-called “impersonator bots” — they pretend to be humans to bypass security measures (2). These impersonator bots create massive costs and headaches to the whole internet community.

Social media sites are plagued by bots spreading misinformation and spamming their real, valued users.

Many online marketers pay by impression, that is, the number of times a person has been shown the ad. Bots create fraudulent impressions — up to 37% of all views — and end up costing the advertising industry billions of dollars (3).

Cyber security teams, who are constantly trying to stay a step ahead of these bots, often create worse user experiences when they make a bot’s job harder: email verifications, CAPTCHAs, reCAPTCHAs, multiple click-through screens, etc.

The standard steps taken to combat bot fraud are fraught with problems: they constantly make real humans prove themselves, they’re clunky, and they’re often quickly out-maneuvered by bot-makers. With Datawallet and Enigma’s Bot or Not solution, the internet will finally have a smooth and secure method of human verification.

And while blockchain technologies are supposed to enable trustless systems, impersonator bots can be used to create sybil attacks — a type of majority attack. There therefore, needs to be a superstructure of user-authentication to prevent such systems failures to reap the benefits of a distributed and trustless system. To provide this superstructure, we have partnered with Enigma to deliver Bot or Not to the world of blockchain and dApps — see the user flow below!

User Flow

How Datawallet users pass a Bot or Not validation in a completely privacy-preserving manner

User builds their Datawallet with their online data such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. Datawallet ensures data has not been manipulated, collates and encrypts data, and then passes the data back to the user. A user requests a Bot or Not authentication, in many cases to create an account or participate with a dApp. User decrypts the data required for the Bot or Not algorithm. During the transfer, the users data is re-encrypted using the Enigma-JS library, and submitted to the Bot or Not contract on the Enigma network, or any other secure computation platform. It’s important to note that the secure multiparty computation (SCPC) of the Enigma network allows this algorithm to run on a user’s data once it’s been distributed in a manner that makes the user anonymous to the nodes computing the algorithm, thereby 100% preserving the privacy of the user. At the same time as 3, a hash of the users re-encrypted user data is submitted to the Enigma Contract on the ethereum network. Within the Bot or Not contract, the Bot or Not algorithm analyzes the user’s data and provides the degree of confidence as to whether the user is a human or a bot. If a there’s a particular dApp the user is trying to use, then the dApp will have provided a contract address on the Ethereum network, and the Enigma node that performed the computation will send the result to that contract. The result will also be returned, in encrypted format, to the user. Furthermore, any future dApp that wants to know whether the user is a bot or not doesn’t need to perform the computation again, because the user’s status was stored — encrypted by the user’s key — in the Datawallet–Enigma contract.

User Flow Diagram

Future considerations

Empowering users with control over their data is just the first step Datawallet is taking to create the new data ecosystem, where those who create data are able to profit from it. The next step is products like Bot or Not, which is built on top of a user’s self-sovereign Datawallet and activates the massive latent value of her data. As Datawallet and it’s community grows, we’re excited to present services like Bot or Not that illustrate the value and importance of controlling your own data.

And here at Datawallet, we aren’t satisfied by building solutions solely for blockchain technologies. That’s why we’re currently working on tools that will enable us to integrate Bot or Not and any other Datawallet-based solution within the internet framework — so watch out CAPTCHA (and many others 😉)!

If you want to enjoy the value of your data, sign up for our beta app at https://www.datawallet.com!

And if you have an idea for a data-app and want to be a part of the future of data, please reach out to us at dev@datawallet.com.

TL;DR: Our Bot or Not service leverages your historical data and provides immutable proof that you are, in fact, human, to anyone questioning if you’re a bot — and it does so in a completely privacy preserving manner.

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If you have further questions please contact the team via our official Telegram Group or stay up to date with only the most important news via our official Telegram Datawallet Daily Channel.

Make sure to also follow Datawallet on Twitter // Medium // Reddit // Youtube

Datawallet — Take control of your data.

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Footnotes

(1) We’d like to note that not all bots are bad. Many good bots are used to improve web services such as search engines, and are a crucial part of the internet’s infrastructure.

(2) https://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-traffic-report-2016.html

(3) https://nativeadvertisinginstitute.com/blog/cost-ad-fraud/