How to Solve Cloudflare Captcha with Python & Selenium

Did you even know? Roughly 20% of the websites you need to scrape use Cloudflare, a rising and powerful anti-bot protection system that can easily defeat your efforts. If you're struggling with Cloudflare captcha failures, you're not alone. In a world where every second counts, many people lose precious time due to CAPTCHA obstacles. But don't worry, in this article we will tell how to solve Cloudflare CAPTCHA problem in 2024. We will explain what Cloudflare CAPTCHA is, why it sometimes fails and provide an effective solution to overcome these obstacles through Python & Selenium. Ready to get started? Let's get started!

Table of Content

• What is Cloudflare Captcha
• How does Cloudflare detect bots?
• How to Solve Cloudflare Captcha
• Conclusion

What is Cloudflare Captcha

Cloudflare provides networking tools, and offers a comprehensive suite of security features to safeguard websites from various online threats. Cloudflare Captcha is a feature that is used to distinguish between human users and automated bots. It’s an essential component of Cloudflare’s security services, designed to defend websites against automated attacks and abuse.

Unique Features of Cloudflare CAPTCHA

Integrated Security Solution: Cloudflare's CAPTCHA service is often offered as part of its overall security solution, including DDoS protection, Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and more. This allows websites to receive comprehensive security protection from a single platform.

Intelligent Traffic Management:

Cloudflare leverages its global network and intelligent traffic management technology to more effectively protect websites by dynamically triggering CAPTCHA when it detects unusual traffic or potential threats.

Seamless User Experience

Cloudflare is committed to providing a seamless user experience by reducing disruption to legitimate users. For example, their "Turnstile" CAPTCHA is designed to authenticate human visitors with minimal user interaction.

Privacy

With an emphasis on privacy, Cloudflare is committed to reducing reliance on and collection of user data and providing more privacy-friendly authentication methods.

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How does Cloudflare detect bots?

1. Chromedriver Detection

• Determining whether the browser is controlled by automation tools.
• Automation tools like Chromedriver can be detected by checking for specific browser behaviors and properties that are typical of automated scripts. For example, certain JavaScript variables or browser attributes can reveal the presence of automation tools. Additionally, monitoring the timing and pattern of interactions can help identify non-human behavior.

2. Device Fingerprinting

• If the same browser fingerprint is used for a large number of visits, it can be identified as machine behavior. It is necessary to use different effective browser fingerprint information to distribute visits.
• Device fingerprinting involves collecting various attributes from the user's device, such as screen resolution, installed fonts, browser plugins, and more. By combining these attributes, a unique identifier (fingerprint) can be created for each device. Repeated use of the same fingerprint across multiple sessions can indicate automated activity. To mitigate this, it is essential to randomize and vary the fingerprint data to appear more human-like.

3. IP Proxy Detection

• Blocking malicious IP locations and limiting request frequency.
• IP proxy detection involves identifying and blocking IP addresses that are known to be associated with malicious activities or high-frequency requests. Techniques include maintaining a blacklist of known bad IP addresses, using geolocation data to block suspicious regions, and implementing rate limiting to prevent excessive requests from a single IP address. Additionally, analyzing the behavior patterns of IP addresses can help distinguish between legitimate users and automated bots.

4. Browser Authenticity

• Checking whether the browser attributes and request information are abnormal, such as whether the User-Agent in the header is issued by Python code, and whether the browser declared by the User-Agent has corresponding attributes.

5. JavaScript Challenge

• Sending JavaScript code to the user. Typically, crawlers do not have the ability to directly render JS. There are corresponding detection methods for simulating script execution through other means. During code execution, a series of device information is collected, such as canvas, navigator, plugins, Chrome version, and a series of physical hardware device information. This device information is encrypted and judged by Cloudflare for authenticity.

6. Cookie

• By checking the validity period of cf_clearance, continuously updating and tracking whether user behavior is abnormal.

7. TLS Fingerprinting

• Browsers generally use HTTP/2, but requests made by programming languages mostly default to HTTP/1.1. Additionally, the JA3 information of browser requests is different from that of programming languages.
• TLS fingerprinting is a technique used to identify and verify TLS (Transport Layer Security) communications.
• TLS fingerprints can determine the characteristics of TLS communication by examining the cipher suites, protocol versions, and encryption algorithms used during the TLS handshake. Since each TLS implementation uses different cipher suites, protocol versions, and encryption algorithms, comparing TLS fingerprints can determine whether the communication comes from the expected source or target.
• TLS fingerprinting can be used to detect security threats such as network spoofing, man-in-the-middle attacks, and espionage activities, as well as to identify and manage devices and applications.

How to Solve Cloudflare Captcha

1. CapSolver

There are many ways to solve the CAPTCHA in cloudflare, but the most popular and efficient way to solve CAPTCHA is to use a third-party solving service, which you can use CapSolver to solve CAPTCHA. Here is one basic steps:

• Use Capsolver to obtain valid token, and then access normally through the TLS request library.

CapSolver can help solve various detection mechanisms by providing valid cookies and session data. Once these credentials are obtained, then you can send the request normally with the token.You need to use the TLS library to send valid requests. This approach ensures that the requests appear authentic and are less likely to be blocked or flagged as suspicious.
Also, using Capsolver can help you solve the following issues:

• IP Detection Use high-quality proxies to solve IP blocking and restrictions.
• JavaScript Challenges Execute JavaScript code just like a real browser, ensuring that the challenges are correctly handled.
• Human Interaction performs corresponding actions in response to challenges, mimicking human behavior
• Device Environment Fingerprinting Use clean and valid browser environment information each time to pass authenticity checks.

The following is the sample code for getting Cloudflare Turnstile solution with Python:

# pip install requests
import requests
import time

api_key = "YOUR_API_KEY"  # TODO: your api key of capsolver
site_key = "0x4XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"  # TODO: site key of your target site
site_url = "https://www.yourwebsite.com"  # TODO: page url of your target site

def capsolver():
    payload = {
        "clientKey": api_key,
        "task": {
            "type": 'AntiTurnstileTaskProxyLess',
            "websiteKey": site_key,
            "websiteURL": site_url,
            "metadata": {
                "action": ""  # optional
            }
        }
    }
    res = requests.post("https://api.capsolver.com/createTask", json=payload)
    resp = res.json()
    task_id = resp.get("taskId")
    if not task_id:
        print("Failed to create task:", res.text)
        return
    print(f"Got taskId: {task_id} / Getting result...")

    while True:
        time.sleep(1)  # delay
        payload = {"clientKey": api_key, "taskId": task_id}
        res = requests.post("https://api.capsolver.com/getTaskResult", json=payload)
        resp = res.json()
        status = resp.get("status")
        if status == "ready":
            return resp.get("solution", {}).get('token')
        if status == "failed" or resp.get("errorId"):
            print("Solve failed! response:", res.text)
            return

token = capsolver()
print(token)

2. Puppeteer, Selenium, Playwright

• Use browser automation tools to drive website access and retrieve data, which can avoid complex JavaScript detection; however, these tools may be detected as being controlled by bots.
• Browser automation tools like Puppeteer, Selenium, and Playwright can simulate real user interactions with websites, including handling JavaScript challenges and rendering dynamic content. While they can solve some detection mechanisms, they often leave traces that can be identified by anti-bot systems. Techniques such as randomizing mouse movements, keystrokes, and other interactions can help mitigate detection risks.

3. Undetected Chromedriver

• Can solve some bot control detections.
• The undetected_chromedriver is a modified version of Chromedriver that includes patches to avoid detection by anti-bot mechanisms. It can handle various forms of browser fingerprinting and other detection techniques by mimicking human-like behavior and modifying browser attributes. This tool is particularly useful for web scraping and automated testing where standard Chromedriver would be blocked.

4. Python curl_cffi to Solve TLS Detection

• After obtaining a valid cookie, use it in combination with other methods to repeatedly access the site. It is crucial to ensure that the TLS request connections are effectively masked; otherwise, data access will still be restricted.

Conclusion

By following these steps, you can solve Cloudflare CAPTCHA using Python and Selenium, along with the CapSolver service. This method ensures that your automation scripts can continue running smoothly without manual intervention. However, always use such techniques ethically and comply with the terms of service of the websites you interact with.