Paraxial.io - Bot prevention for Elixir/Phoenix apps

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Hi Elixir Forum,

I’ve been working on Paraxial.io for a while now, and am excited to announce the beta is officially live! Here’s the announcement post.

If you currently use reCaptcha or a CDN based bot defense (Cloudflare, Akamai, etc.), you’re familiar with the problems bots cause. I’ve seen bypasses of both these systems via:

  1. Outsourced/automated captcha solving.
  2. Hosts leaking their IP address, leading to the CDN protection being completely bypassed.

The key features of Paraxial.io are:

  1. You install the agent through your mix file.
  2. You can define a rule like, “If an IP sends > 10 logins in 10 seconds, ban it”. Unlike a CDN based approach, this cannot be bypassed due to a host IP leak.
  3. If an attacker is using a cloud server (AWS, GCP, etc.) for a large pool of IPs (see Bypassing IP Based Blocking with AWS API Gateway), the Paraxial.io agent can be configured to block cloud provider IPs.
  4. You control the data you want to send to the Paraxial.io backend, unlike a CDN where all your data has to pass through a third party server.
  5. A nice dashboard showing allowed and blocked requests.

Screen Shot 2022-06-06 at 5.56.06 PM
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The price for a personal account is $27 per month, where your site has less than 10,000 good events per month. If you sign up for the beta and provide feedback, I’m happy to drop that to $9. Business pricing scales with the number of requests.

To get access, email support@paraxial.io and I’ll add your email to the approved users list.

I hope this is posted under the correct category, I can move it if it violates a forum rule. Thank you!

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Hi everyone, just a brief update, the beta is no longer invite only! I’ve published a step-by-step guide to installing Paraxial via mix here - Getting started with Paraxial.io — Paraxial v0.0.8

To create an account, just visit - https://app.paraxial.io/users/register - and sign up. The agent is hosted on Hex, and installation only takes a few minutes.

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Hey @realcorvus

I lately noticed that Elixir Companies website is down and it seems the maintainers do not know how to deal with spam – perhaps you could afford the generosity to offer a free plan for that project which promotes elixir?
It looks like adding Paraxial to a website is a breeze.

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It’s a good idea, since Elixir Companies is not run for profit and contributes to the Elixir ecosystem. Paraxial.io is able to detect spam/bot submissions as well.

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Tried using this but it depends on httpoison 1.0 which is a bit absurd given the latest version has been 2.1.0 for quite a while. I use v2 of httpoison because data streaming is a core part of my app so this was a hard stop for me

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Very sorry you ran into this issue, the agent has been updated to include the new versions of httpoison - paraxial | Hex

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