Cloudflare

Protecting APIs from abuse using sequence learning and variable order Markov chains

2024-9-12

Peter Foster

At Cloudflare, we protect customer APIs from abuse. This is no easy task, as abusive traffic can take different forms, from giant DDoS attacks to low-and-slow credential stuffing campaigns. We now address this challenge in a new way: by looking outside typical volumetric measures and using statistical machine learning to find important API client request sequences.