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Ask HN: What gives Cloudflare the right to takedown apps revealing site real IP?

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Ask HN: What gives Cloudflare the right to takedown apps revealing site real IP?

#1
I stumbled across an interesting app called “CrimeFlare” and what it does is reveal the real IP website’s using Cloudflare’s Ddos Mitigation Service.

CloudFlare had it taken down. https://github.com/zidansec/CrimeFlare

I’m assuming it does this by scanning the public internet in it’s entirely, indexing the domains. (A household fiber connection can scan the entire IPv4 space in a mere matter of weeks)

This is obviously a huge threat to CloudFlare’s entire business model and it totally makes sense that they want to bury this.

I just fail to understand what grounds they have to take something like this down. Internet IPs are public knowledge and these websites are publicly accessible. Just because Cloudflare built a billion dollar buisness exploiting the fact that sites “real” IPs can be hidden through obscurity, doesn’t mean they should be able to censor/takedown apps that expose the flaw in their business plan!

Anyways, I intend to create a new internet-wide scanning system in order to revive the functionality of CrimeFlare just to prove a point that security through obscurity is no security and all, and that CloudFlare doesn’t have the right to take something like this down!

Re: Ask HN: What gives Cloudflare the right to takedown apps revealing site real IP?

#4
post #2

>by scanning the public internet in it’s entirely, indexing the domains Can you explain this?

So there’s only 4.2 billion possible IPv4 addresses where a site can live. A lot are reserved or unused, leaving about 3.7 billion possibilities. Household internet speeds are fast enough that it is within the realm of possibility that a computer could sequentially connect to every single IPv4 host on the entire internet in search for the target website. Specialty network cards with datacenter connections can scan the entire Ipv4 space in a matter of mere hours.

Re: Ask HN: What gives Cloudflare the right to takedown apps revealing site real IP?

#6

The name might be infringement or the code might abuse their API. Or, GitHub could decide it's not worth it. Why would you try to scan every IP address?

A valid use case for wanting to know the “real” IP of a site hiding behind CloudFlare is being able to access the website from a Tor IP address (which they categorically block). For users in a country with censored internet, such a service would be essential.

Re: Ask HN: What gives Cloudflare the right to takedown apps revealing site real IP?

#9
post #8

Why on earth would you try to help DDOS'ers? I think you should really take a step back here and reevaluate what drives you here and what impact you have on other people.

aren’t there any legitimate use-cases for it?
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