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Comment by gkop | Hacker News Reader

What other CDN makes it easy to use plaintext between the CDN and origin, yet use a secure connection between the CDN and the end user, and has the nerve to market this as a feature called "Flexible SSL"?

Edit: I wasn't very clear. GP is wrong saying MITM is "wrong" for its own sake. I think Cloudflare is harmful for other reasons though.

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That does seem to be an accurate name, it is a feature that's offered and up to the site operator to enable, and yes it's unfortunate that it potentially gives a false sense of security to end users. However in almost every case, it's still better than both sides of the connection being unsecured.

I'm not sure what this has to do with all CDNs being MITM operators when caching secure content.

At the very least, Cloudflare should do a better job of discouraging use of Flexible SSL. People that opt in to Flexible SSL should know what they are doing.

I edited my comment.

This incident affects Full SSL sites too.

Yes. I should have been more clear that Flexible SSL has nothing to do with the incident, it's just another sign that Cloudflare is dangerous to the web.

Wouldn't full SSL traffic be encrypted if leaked and therefore kind of irrlevant?

"Full SSL" in this case just means that the traffic is always encrypted on the network, Cloudflare still has to decrypt it locally to do what a CDN does.

Oh shit. Got it. Also Jesus fuck

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