Overview

HUMAN’s Applications Protection platform architecture is based on three major elements:

• The HUMAN Sensor
• The HUMAN Enforcer
• The HUMAN Detector

These three parts work together as a whole to provide a holistic defense strategy to protect your application from unwanted bot and agent activity.

Detector

The HUMAN Detector is HUMAN’s cloud-based risk analysis engine that’s responsible for ingesting and reviewing all request data sent from the HUMAN Sensor and Enforcer. The Detector uses machine learning and behavioral analytics to determine an interaction’s risk score from 0-100, then sends this score to the Sensor, which encrypts or encodes that score and inserts it as a cookie on the client. The Detector also continuously learns and improves its models based on reported results. This ensures HUMAN’s risk assessment and defense mechanism stays relevant while adjusting to your unique use case.

While the Detector typically doesn’t send information to the Enforcer directly, it occasionally sends the risk score when the Enforcer requests it via the Risk API. This only happens when the cookie is invalid or missing.

Sensor

The HUMAN Sensor is the mechanism that collects data about the user journey on the browser side. It records your application’s users and devices, their behaviors, and different network activities, then sends these signals to the HUMAN Detector, which calculates a risk score for the user. Then, the Sensor encrypts or encodes the score and creates a cookie that’s sent to the HUMAN Enforcer, which decides whether to block or allow the user based on the score.

HUMAN provides a JavaScript snippet that you can insert into your application. This snippet loads the Sensor in the browser.

Enforcer

The HUMAN Enforcer is a lightweight SDK that is typically installed on your CDN, load balancer, or origin. We recommend you install the Enforcer server-side so that it can accurately review each protected request and send this data to the HUMAN Detector. This data, in combination with the Sensor’s client-side data, determines the risk score for the user.

The Enforcer receives the risk score in one of two ways:

1. From the client request as a cookie, which was created by the Sensor.
2. Directly from the Detector. This only happens when the cookie is invalid or missing from the client request. If that’s the case, then the Enforcer requests the score from the Detector via HUMAN’s Risk API.

Based on the score and any existing policy rules you set in the HUMAN Console, the Enforcer decides whether to block or allow the user.