用文字谜题限制AI网络代理访问速度,防止滥用。
Throttling Web Agents Using Reasoning Gates
- 通过多跳推理谜题增加代理的计算成本。
- 生成响应的成本是当前顶级模型的9.2倍。
- 适合需要防范自动化攻击的服务方使用。
AI网络代理以远超人类的速度、规模和复杂性使用互联网资源,改变了用户与服务的交互方式。若被恶意或误用,可能造成内容提供商过载,或绕过验证码、批量注册账号等防御机制。为此,本文提出一种可调节成本的访问控制框架——网络代理限流(Web Agent Throttling)。核心是设计对代理不对称、可扩展、鲁棒且兼容任意代理的“限流门”(Throttling Gates)。聚焦语言模型组件,要求代理解决推理谜题以增加令牌生成开销。然而,现有数学或编程类谜题无法满足需求。因此,我们引入基于回文(rebus)的推理门,这类合成文本谜题需依赖世界知识进行多跳推理,从而有效拖慢代理。设计了可扩展的生成与验证协议。实验显示,响应生成成本比生成成本高9.2倍,实现计算不对称。在自建网站及Model Context Protocol(MCP)服务器上部署并测试真实世界代理。最后讨论了实际部署中的局限性和环境影响。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
AI web agents use Internet resources at far greater speed, scale, and complexity -- changing how users and services interact. Deployed maliciously or erroneously, these agents could overload content providers. At the same time, web agents can bypass CAPTCHAs and other defenses by mimicking user behavior or flood authentication systems with fake accounts. Yet providers must protect their services and content from denial-of-service attacks and scraping by web agents. In this paper, we design a framework that imposes tunable costs on agents before providing access to resources; we call this Web Agent Throttling. We start by formalizing Throttling Gates as challenges issued to an agent that are asymmetric, scalable, robust, and compatible with any agent. Focusing on a common component -- the language model -- we require the agent to solve reasoning puzzles, thereby incurring excessive token-generation costs. However, we find that using existing puzzles, e.g., coding or math, as throttling gates fails to satisfy our properties. To address this, we introduce rebus-based Reasoning Gates, synthetic text puzzles that require multi-hop reasoning over world knowledge (thereby throttling an agent's model). We design a scalable generation and verification protocol for such reasoning gates. Our framework achieves computational asymmetry, i.e., the response-generation cost is 9.2x higher than the generation cost for SOTA models. We further deploy reasoning gates on a custom website and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and evaluate with real-world web agents. Finally, we discuss the limitations and environmental impact of real-world deployment of our framework.
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