Autopilot
Autopilot continuously adjusts a Security Group's challenge difficulty and enforcement policy based on the traffic Sentinel actually observes, instead of a fixed configuration you set once and forget. It's the recommended default for most deployments — strong security with minimal hands-on tuning.
What it manages
Autopilot automatically activates and manages three things together:
- Adaptive Proof-of-Work complexity — raising or lowering PoW difficulty as traffic patterns shift.
- Adaptive Captcha — deploying the Frictionless Captcha vs. Code Challenge split based on risk.
- Default rate limiting — a baseline limit of 50 requests per 10 minutes per EDK (Ephemeral Device Key), suitable for most deployments out of the box.
It also draws on Threat Intelligence to block requests from known-malicious IPs directly. Note that a request can be blocked before it ever reaches the rate limit above, if its overall threat score is already high enough on other grounds.
Enabling it
Autopilot is on by default on new Security Groups. Toggle it from the Security Group's configuration in the admin interface — there's no separate env var to set. Turning it off hands full manual control back to you over PoW complexity, Adaptive Captcha, and rate limits via Security Group rules.
Related
- Adaptive Captcha — the mechanism Autopilot tunes.
- Rate Limiters — the default rate limiting Autopilot applies, and how to configure limits manually.
- Threat Intelligence — the IP-reputation blocking Autopilot draws on.
- Get Started — Autopilot is on by default in a new deployment.