August 27, 2018
This post details how hCaptcha works on a technical level, in the interest of providing more transparency to our users and to communicate our thinking on how to build a secure and valuable service.
Note: hCaptcha is under active development and details may change in the future.
The hCaptcha service is designed to produce datasets for machine learning. It does this by providing a useful service to website owners. Protecting their sites from non-human actors and bots via a captcha lets hCaptcha use work from site visitors that would otherwise be unproductive effort.
Everyone benefits from this:
From a broad perspective, hCaptcha automates and secures datasets and transactions that take place.
When a labeling requestor comes to us, behind the scenes an Ethereum smart contract with their job details is created and launched on the blockchain:
We then aggregate these job requests and provide them in the form of captcha tasks served up by the websites who use our service.
Website owners are a crucial part of this infrastructure. To incentivize them to help in this process, we use the funds in escrow provided by the requestor to pay site owners in proportion to the correct answers supplied by their users.
For website owners, the process to get involved is incredibly simple and is built to be a drop-in replacement for existing captcha services out there. Simply sign up, add our javascript tags where you want to protect your site, and tell us where you’d like the funds to be sent. It’s as easy as that.
A common question that arises is: “how does hCaptcha know the answers to user-submitted, generic tasks if a human has never been involved?”
The answer is by combining a number of different techniques:
We have additional thoughts on how to improve this process down the road — this is just the beginning.
There’s so much we want to do with this and we are working towards these goals as quickly as possible:
In the near future we also intend to release a whitepaper covering the design to improve transparency, security, and share with the world our ideas and tools.
If this is interesting to you, get in touch! We’re looking for talented individuals that are excited by this mission to help us build it out.
We’re also looking for both sides of the equation described above. If you can benefit from our services — get signed up!