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Ask HN: Why is there not more concern about the physical security of Cloudflare?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is there not more concern about the physical security of Cloudflare?

#51

Post by amalcon »

There are, roughly, four kinds of physical security one can have in a datacenter:

1) Nothing

2) Visitor logs

3) Locks and alarms on your racks, and/or (if you have enough) the rooms they are in. Remote monitoring is pretty common.

4) First party human security professionals

I don't have any special knowledge of Cloudflare's set-up, but 2 and 3 are by far the most common. Lacking #1 means your hardware just gets stolen. #4 is too expensive. #2 and #3 are where most people are, so probably something around there?

Re: Ask HN: Why is there not more concern about the physical security of Cloudflare?

#52

Post by iwontberude »

organsnyder wrote: post #40
advisedwang wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because edge serving has numerous advantages the OP would presumably like to take advantage of. If you have customers all over the world, "using your own datacenter" either means operating tens of datacenters or giving some of your customers high latency.

Then share the nonsensitive assets via a CDN, and host a separate sensitive endpoint (with higher latency) in a more controlled environment.

I think anything which can be delivered to the web browser from CloudFlare could be part of the kill chain for a eager attacker.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there not more concern about the physical security of Cloudflare?

#54

Post by jjav »

simonw wrote: post #4

It's interesting to explore https://where.durableobjects.live/ - a tool that maps where Cloudflare's worker scripts actually run. Notably, while Cloudflare has CDN edge locations in countries like China and Russia they don't appear to run workers there. EDIT: I was wrong - I misinterpreted the map. A solid border circle around a location indicates "Worker-only Datacenter" (see the map legend) and there are indeed loc…

> consistently refer to encryption in transit

For cloudflare to refer to encryption in transit is quite something, given that cloudflare is the largest MITM service in the planet. SO much traffic goes through them and they have it all in cleartext due to terminating TLS.

Remember "Encryption removed and added here".

Re: Ask HN: Why is there not more concern about the physical security of Cloudflare?

#55

Post by _hyn3 »

viraptor wrote: post #24
udev4096 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it difficult to actually analyze the RAM content for any sensitive data? There is so much noise in it

A bit hard, but not crazy. You have to potentially deal with not knowing the mappings, but even random blocks will have obvious marks like Json fragments with "password=", crypto keys with common PEM/DER headers, high entropy 8/16/32-byte data, etc.

For fun, sometime, try this:

    sudo strings /dev/sda | more # press q to quit
You'll immediately see plain text of various things on your hard drive, complete HTML, etc. Eye opening.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there not more concern about the physical security of Cloudflare?

#58

Post by organsnyder »

iwontberude wrote: post #52
organsnyder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then share the nonsensitive assets via a CDN, and host a separate sensitive endpoint (with higher latency) in a more controlled environment.

I think anything which can be delivered to the web browser from CloudFlare could be part of the kill chain for a eager attacker.

If that's your threat model, then you either need to build your own CDN (from the data center up) or find a vendor willing to sell you the features you need. It won't be cheap.
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