Anubis to add WebAssembly checks to raise cost of mass scraping
The next version of Anubis will let administrators deploy Hashcash-style proof-of-work challenges through thresholds or bot rules.
Anubis plans to include WebAssembly-based proof-of-work checks in its next version, giving administrators another way to make large-scale web scraping more computationally expensive.
The project said in a blog post published on 6 September that the feature followed about a year of development. Administrators will be able to activate the checks through configured thresholds or bot rules.
Anubis uses a proof-of-work model based on Hashcash, a scheme proposed to reduce email spam. The additional computational burden is intended to be comparatively low for individual users while becoming more costly when deployed at mass-scraping scale.
The project described the system as an interim measure while it works on improved fingerprinting and headless-browser detection. The aim is to reduce the number of proof-of-work challenges shown to users considered more likely to be legitimate.
The developer attributed the work to hundreds of commits, five generations of pull requests, dozens of tests and a partial rewrite of Anubis in Rust. The account also cited a compiler bug and at least three incidents in which a personal server ran out of RAM during development.
Anubis requires modern JavaScript features, which the project said may be disabled by privacy plugins such as JShelter. No release date or version number was provided for the planned feature.
