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Recently I have been getting cautious about Cloudflare. I do use them and like them a lot, also enjoy reading their technical blogposts. However from a privacy stand point it makes me feel uneasy. Cloudflare is just everywhere now: HN, Stackoverflow, Reddit and countless other sites. You can block a cookie, connection to a third party script, but how do you block an internal proxy? All your cookies, credentials, heck…
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1. Non-SNI based SSL means you need an IP per host. 2. People attack IP addresses. Handy to be able to change the IP address of a web site. 3. Countries block sites based on IP addresses. Handy to be able to move sites around to prevent collateral damage.
In my defense, I was assuming SNI (aka the modern internet), and that the IP was reachable by those you care for it to be reachable by. Ignoring these issues, is there an "engineering" reason why a single IP won't work, in terms of, for example, hardware can't demultiplex the aggregate ingress volume of CloudFlare and handle DOS mitigation? I guess I'm asking this because of how woeful looking the "load-balancing" so…
1) Anycast doesn't give you fine grain control. Once we announce our anycast routes, what traffic actually gets sent where is out of our control - it is based on the peering arrangements of our transit providers. If we need to balance traffic between our pops, we need finer grained control than a single anycast IP.
2) IP addresses get blocked for all sorts of reasons (looking at you China!) If all customers were on one IP address, as soon as China decides to block one customer, they are all blocked.
3) Anycast sometimes has weird behavior. For example, traffic might be sent to a datacenter that might be close in terms of peer links, but far in terms of physical distance and latency. Using DNS, we can route around these issues.
I am not sure what you mean about the "40gbps fat-server's load of traffic" causing issues. We handle many customers that push more than that.
Recently I have been getting cautious about Cloudflare. I do use them and like them a lot, also enjoy reading their technical blogposts. However from a privacy stand point it makes me feel uneasy. Cloudflare is just everywhere now: HN, Stackoverflow, Reddit and countless other sites. You can block a cookie, connection to a third party script, but how do you block an internal proxy? All your cookies, credentials, heck…
What CloudFlare logs: https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-cloudflare-logs/
However my concern is more to do with thinking as an outsider. I have toyed with idea of a company that requires establishment of trust among users. Although it may seem as simple as do no evil on the surface, it is an extremely hard undertaking. The thing with Cloudflare is that its niche is its own problem, "Man in the Middle", even if I were to place trust in the privacy policy, there are other things I need to be worried about. What if there is a break in and a hacker places a sniffer to sniff the communication between Cloudflare and the client sites? Sure the client followed the best practices such as, one way hash, strong crypto (eg bcrypt), 1000+ iterations, database encryption, https communication, etc but all of it is pointless or redundant now because the browser ends up sending the password in plaintext. Now imagine if instead of an hacker its a govt agency and that too with a gag order. See my concern?
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Problem is that (besides for the brand) Cloudflare really has nothing to offer for Google. Google has spent the last 20 years solving the same problems CF is aiming to solve, they've even got a competing service Google PageSpeed that does exactly what CF does, except better (in my personal experience.).
Google sucks at productizing their infrastructure expertise. The underlying tech at Google is indeed better than CloudFlare, but CloudFlare understands marketing, ease-of-use, product simplicity, all those stuff that are necessary to get people to actually use your offering.
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Example: Data Flow is in Alpha & Logging is in Beta.
Go on App Engine has been in beta for years
And that's what they have built using Google Cloud Platform: http://www.cloudways.com/en/managed-google-compute-engine.ph...
I wonder if this is one of those strategic deals that would lead to an acquisition. With the push surrounding cloud and Google actively competing hard in this space, it would make a lot of sense.
Oh wow, Google is already on every site with Analytics, imagine if they were also the SSL host/WAF/CDN/DNS host for every major property? It would fit in well with their silent yet never ending reach across the internet.
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Got it, cool.
They also capture all your content and communications.
Recently I have been getting cautious about Cloudflare. I do use them and like them a lot, also enjoy reading their technical blogposts. However from a privacy stand point it makes me feel uneasy. Cloudflare is just everywhere now: HN, Stackoverflow, Reddit and countless other sites. You can block a cookie, connection to a third party script, but how do you block an internal proxy? All your cookies, credentials, heck…
What CloudFlare logs: https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-cloudflare-logs/
CloudFlare gets to see the cleartext of all traffic they serve as they MITM HTTPS connections.