The advent of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence has flooded the internet with bots, not to mention that more than 28% of them are ‘bad’ or ‘scammy’ bots. There are bots that post unwanted content, spread malicious links, spam fraudulent reviews and engage in sharing undesired or excessive content. Instances can be traced back as early as 2009 when a twitter spam-bot offered a job with Google. Even though developments in machine intelligence had not taken a full swing, bad bots were still able to penetrate the website ‘ajobwithgoogle.com’, to post malicious content.     

Penetration of bots is especially problematic for open-source sites, which do not require the extra verification steps to create an account. Nowadays, almost 56% of the bot traffic is used for malicious purposes that we encounter on websites. Bots can post content such as comments and reviews in the form of spam, which can create a bad reputation for the website.   

One of the pertinent solutions being used, to tackle scammy bots, is the Google reCAPTCHA. Although Google reCAPTCHA helps to identify humans from bots, it comes at the cost of a single entity owning all the authentication data. Moreover, reCAPTCHAs are not 100% accurate and can be solved by machines, which have indeed created them. In 2014, the researchers were able to crack down reCAPTCHA with a 33% success rate using machine learning.

A more promising solution could be the decentralized identity verification mechanism where the distributed ledger technology can be harnessed to keep the personal identity of the individuals secure. The blockchain being 100% open-source eliminates the problem of a ‘centralized’ entity like Google, which keeps a track of all the user data.

As reCAPTCHA is not 100% reliable, there are situations where it can falsely identify humans as bots and vica-versa. Putting Identity Verification Mechanisms in place would ensure that only necessary information is shared to track down the identity of an individual. When authenticating the identity of the user, the decentralized verification system binds a public key by default and hands over the private key to the user. This allows that only the individual and no one else can verify his/her identity by matching the public key stored in the blockchain.     

Any website can make use of this open source blockchain protocol for easy API integration in order to replace reCaptcha with much more secure and decentralized identity verification system.