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

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31–40 of 61 posts

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

#31
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.

Publishing such tools raises awareness of the weakness, and pushes vulnerable origin servers to fix it. Ideally cloudflare would show a warning in their UI when the origin server is publicly accessible.

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

#32
post #23

If folks are really concerned about getting exposed they can firewall off everyone except cloudflare. https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/

Or better yet: use Cloudflare Tunnel to connect your origin to Cloudflare without exposing any inbound ports. I think you can also have Cloudflare present a client certificate that you can verify before responding.

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

#33

> This is obviously a huge threat to CloudFlare’s entire business model I disagree. There are plenty of ways to hide your origin server, for example: 1. IPv6 only, since there are too many addresses to scan 2. Accepting connections only from cloudflare IPs (probably not enough on its own, since features like workers might allow an attacker to trigger requests from a cloudflare server) 3. Mutual TLS authentication 4.…

[deleted]

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

#34
> This is obviously a huge threat to CloudFlare’s entire business model and it totally makes sense that they want to bury this.

Protecting origin servers is hard. Nothing unique to CloudFlare about that. If you follow their set up documentation then this tool can't harm you: https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/get-started/t...

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

#35
post #20

>, 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, I'm not familiar with CrimeFlare and its technical details but a cursory google search shows that security-through-obscurity is possible with Cloudflare if one follows the correct sequence of steps to hide the ip. Otherwise, a carele…

What % of Cloudflare customers actually have their server set to only accept traffic from cloudflare IPs? Probably not the majority. If this is coming as a surprise to people then maybe Cloudflare isn’t doing enough to help people secure themselves against it.

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

#36
post #35
post #20

>, 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, I'm not familiar with CrimeFlare and its technical details but a cursory google search shows that security-through-obscurity is possible with Cloudflare if one follows the correct sequence of steps to hide the ip. Otherwise, a carele…

What % of Cloudflare customers actually have their server set to only accept traffic from cloudflare IPs? Probably not the majority. If this is coming as a surprise to people then maybe Cloudflare isn’t doing enough to help people secure themselves against it.

As someone else (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31096321) pointed out, everyone does that already, with Shodan (https://www.shodan.io/) being one of the most popular ones.

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

#37
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.

Before CloudFlare sends the FBI to my house..I’m not actually going to code this. It’s just an idea that exposes a problem. The problem is there’s a lot of Cloudflare customers who don’t have their servers configured properly to defend from it. If my amateur self can conceptualize this idea it means cybercriminals already have similar tools and are using them already so If you’re a site operator you should use this post as a warning and fix your servers ahead of time. However, it was messed up they might try to take down the tool rather then help mitigate the flaw.

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

#38
post #7

as far as i remember when the backend times out, CloudFlare shows a screen where you can see the actual IP of the server

That would defeat the whole purpose of using Cloudflare as an anti-ddos measure so I doubt that.

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

#39

> This is obviously a huge threat to CloudFlare’s entire business model I disagree. There are plenty of ways to hide your origin server, for example: 1. IPv6 only, since there are too many addresses to scan 2. Accepting connections only from cloudflare IPs (probably not enough on its own, since features like workers might allow an attacker to trigger requests from a cloudflare server) 3. Mutual TLS authentication 4.…

Cloudflare can easily do 4 as well. Use Transform Rules to inject Authorization header or any other one you want.
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