Live data from Hacker News

Universal SSL

blog.cloudflare.com

131–140 of 250 posts

Re: Universal SSL

#131

Once IPv6 is a bit more popular, will CloudFlare use a unique IP per customer to get around SNI or will it still be used on IPv6? It seems a bit like NAT; something that can safely die once IPv4 is gone.

According to the article, they are already doing that.

Thanks for pointing that out, I seemed to have missed it.

Re: Universal SSL

#132
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they should do is require that the server has at least a self-signed certificate. They already support that but don't require it.

What good would that do? A self-signed cert is about as secure as no cert at all. (Unless they implement their own form of certificate pinning for the origin, which would cause problems for sites with multiple certs on the same host, which is quite common)

> A self-signed cert is about as secure as no cert at all.

It protects enormously against a casual attacker who is able to sniff network traffic but not MITM you.

Re: Universal SSL

#133
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could a third party sign up to cloudflare for a domain they do not own and somehow spoof the checks? You need to point the your domain to CloudFlare nameserver. I don't think you can do that unless you actually control the domain.

I guess you're right about that, but it still feels a bit weird that a third party can just allocate a private key and a valid certificate without the actual owner of the domain requesting it.

If you've given up control of the DNS on your domain to a third party, they can do whatever they want with that domain - they ultimately control email, web, and any other services on that domain. so if you use cloudflare, you've already given up that control and trust them completely with your domain.

This is what makes me hesitant about using cloudflare or recommending it to clients; you give up a lot of control over your data and domains.

Re: Universal SSL

#134
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they should do is require that the server has at least a self-signed certificate. They already support that but don't require it.

What good would that do? A self-signed cert is about as secure as no cert at all. (Unless they implement their own form of certificate pinning for the origin, which would cause problems for sites with multiple certs on the same host, which is quite common)

A self-signed cert at least prevents wiretapping. Even if there is a man in the middle only that "man" can get your data. Not great but a lot better than nothing.

Re: Universal SSL

#135
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they should do is require that the server has at least a self-signed certificate. They already support that but don't require it.

What good would that do? A self-signed cert is about as secure as no cert at all. (Unless they implement their own form of certificate pinning for the origin, which would cause problems for sites with multiple certs on the same host, which is quite common)

Self-signed cert is perfect when you can share it beforehand as CloudFlare users/customers could with CloudFlare through CloudFlare's panel. That way no one, not even a rogue CA, could forge it.

It's just probably too much effort for a small number of users who would go through the trouble. Or maybe not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8382774

Re: Universal SSL

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that CloudFlare is positioning themselves as another Google or Facebook, where a key feature of their business is that they get to track the web history of a large portion of internet users. CloudFlare's business model is not offering a free service and figure out how to make money. It's getting people to pay us money and those people are our actual customers who run web sites: https://www.cloudflare.c…

Do they have a Zero Knowledge policy or anything close to it, though? It doesn't matter if they don't make money from it, if they still collect all the data. I don't know how a service that's meant to cache data is supposed to be "zero knowledge", but hopefully they can do something about that - until it's too late and authorities already have a 1,000 requests lined up for their data.

It's not just supposed to cache data (though it probably makes sense for most static data), it can also act as a firewall for your dynamic data, improving response times and preventing DDoS.

Re: Universal SSL

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a good idea as well. In their blog post they discuss how "Full SSL" is much better security than "Flexible SSL", but by not making it a requirement a lot of people won't bother with it.

"Full SSL" is still useless against an advanced attacker as it does absolutely nothing to prevent MITM. Only "Strict SSL" does, which makes sure it's a valid CA-signed certificate. What we need (and what myself and others have requested) is Full SSL with fingerprint checking so you can keep security with a self-signed cert. I honestly think CF should remove flexible SSL and full SSL as options - they're just too vuln…

Or public key pinning: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-websec-key-pinning-19

Re: Universal SSL

#138
post #125
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your tinfoil's got a hole in it there buddy! But also https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency Could probs do with being a bit closer to realtime but it's more transparent than most hosts/ISPs

CloudFlare has never installed any law enforcement software or equipment anywhere on our network. CloudFlare has never provided any law enforcement organization a feed of our customers' content transiting our network. which is all great, except that the NSA is not a law-enforcement organization. It's an intelligence agency.

You've uncovered the secret behind CloudFlare! They're actually a sub-cell of the NSA!

That explains how they're able to do all of this for free accounts

Re: Universal SSL

#140
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope so. But I'm still trying to figure out how. The only way I see they do it is that they check that the nameservers responsible for the domain actually points to cloudflares nameservers. This check doesn't seem to happen for http traffic, so it would be interesting to see how that works with https.

Not sure about cloudflare, as I never used them, but typically such services will ask you to create some subdomain (ie. cf1234.example.com).

In this case, after you move DNS over, Cloudflare can transparently send a /VALID-FILE-3249fujej.txt on the root or temporarily add an A/TXT/CNAME record for verification that lasts a few seconds.
Post reply on HN