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Comment by burner5692 | Hacker News Reader

Before using a Cloudflare product, please consider if you want to contribute to the Internet's largest man-in-the-middle attack. They have a poor track record when it comes to security[0], privacy[1], and censorship[2]. We're at the point where it's our responsibility to protect the Internet and keep these companies in check. Cloudflare is among the worst existential threats to the Internet.

[0]: https://gizmodo.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-cloudb...

[1]: https://blog.torproject.org/trouble-cloudflare

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/cloudflare-daily-...

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[0]: Cloudflare provides SSL certificates to millions of web sites (even ones that don't pay us), was one of the first to deploy TLS 1.3 and quantum-resistant crypto, provides DDoS mitigation to all customers (again including free customers), etc. But yeah, we had a bug once. :/

[1]: Cloudflare now implements Privacy Pass which means Tor users mostly don't see captchas anymore.

[2]: Please read: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

> [0]: Cloudflare provides SSL certificates to millions of web sites (even ones that don't pay us)

No, you don't. You proxy their traffic and encrypt it on the way out, undermining the security of the Web by creating a single point of failure that you've proven unable to defend.

Genuinely asking: isn't it true that Cloudflare gets to see the plaintext traffic of sites that it proxies?

Even if Cloudflare is a big champion of better encryption and is currently not doing anything shady with this ability, it's a concerning power for one organization to have.

(Of course, if Cloudflare doesn't see the plaintext, then disregard)

It does with its free offering. It has a paid version that does not MITM the connection, IIRC.

Isn't that true of essentially any IaaS provider? Heroku or AWS could access anything running on your machine just by instrumenting their virtualization system if they cared to.

Part of the move to the cloud was the decision that well organized companies with large security teams can do a better job protecting internet resources than the vast majority of individuals. Cloudflare is just that, for cache/firewall/etc. appliances, I don't see the difference.

That's a really good point. Unless you're using plain VM's, you're either giving your SSL keys to the provider or having them setup SSL for you.

Didn't really think about how many services do this: AWS' ELB, any serverless service, Heroku and other PaaS services, etc.

I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but the number of people who mention Cloudflare as some kind of MITM threat and then also use a cloud provider with elastic load balancer and god knows what else at the same time is staggering - and just plain frustrating.

I'm personally not offended. All my stuff is on a private, on-prem OpenStack. So, I'm not very hip to the public offerings and what trust they entail.

>Unless you're using plain VM

Even a plain VM is easily observable for whoever is hosting it. At the end of the day you have to either trust your service providers or do it yourself, whether that's securing your network infrastructure or emptying the trash can next to your desk.

That's absolutely true. Just not something I think of regularly, because I'm on all private infrastructure.

>[0]: Cloudflare provides SSL certificates to millions of web sites

With let's encrypt SSL certs are free and easier to use than ever.

>[1]: Cloudflare now implements Privacy Pass which means Tor users mostly don't see captchas anymore.

Yeah, at the expense of deanomymizing them and only if they install your addon in their web browser!

Privacy Pass does not deanonymize users. Go read the mathematics before making statements like that: https://privacypass.github.io/

Click "new identity" on the tor button plugin and privacy pass will continue to send the same tokens to the destination. Passes are persisted between browser sessions. It also identifies different people connecting via the same Tor circuit. Am I missing something?

> Am I missing something?

Yes, you're missing the whole cryptographic underpinnings of Privacy Pass which make it impossible to de-anonymize the user. I know, it sounds like impossible magic at first, but read the papers -- it actually works.

"Same tokens" or "same token"? If it sends a different token from the same set of one-time use tokens, and if their crypto does what it claims to do, then that doesn't deanonymize you.

By different users do you mean that it demonstrates to the server that multiple instances of the plugin are behind the same Tor circuit? If it's using different tokens, I don't think the server gets to learn that; it could be multiple instances of the plugin accessing 30 pages each, or one instance accessing 60 pages.

I agree with what you said, and I like you (so I don't want to hammer on this on a day you should be celebrating a cool thing you made), but...

You missed what I think is the most important thing: Cloudflare currently entails correlated risk, for lack of a better term. A government intrusion into CF represents access to thousands and thousands of sites' decrypted streams. This is a huge target for the US, Russian, and other spy agencies, to the extent that I cannot believe you're not already compromised.

All those small customers who are using you for free TLS should be using Let's Encrypt so they can get end-to-end encryption, necessitating individual, active attacks (I suppose on DNS) rather than sweeping, passive attacks.

I think there are some cool and good things that Cloudflare does, but it's irresponsible to minimize the threat it presents to privacy in today's internet.

[Edit: Also, if you don't want to respond to this thread, I will totally understand, and think that's reasonable. I don't want to shit on your cake!]

Isn't the entire idea of the cloud a massive correlated risk? If AWS is hacked, it would be very bad. That said, experience has seemed to show that people who build infrastructure tend to make less mistakes in that way than the millions of people who are building businesses and personal sites would. I agree that in a perfect world security would be easy to get right and federated, but it seems like it you have to pick one 'right' is the best choice for now.

Do you use any cloud providers?

Yes, TLS termination is something that people get wrong, but there are other ways of decreasing that risk than to hand off the task entirely to someone else.

And yes, if AWS were compromised, that would suck. But right now a lot of CloudFlare sites are backed by AWS. So now their traffic is at risk in two places, not just one.

I don't tend to use cloud providers, no. I self-host some stuff out of my house, with reliance on DNS and CAs being the major points of "correlated risk". I use S3 for serving some public files.

> Cloudflare currently entails correlated risk, for lack of a better term. A government intrusion into CF represents access to thousands and thousands of sites' decrypted streams. This is a huge target for the US, Russian, and other spy agencies, to the extent that I cannot believe you're not already compromised.

Why is this different from a bunch of people running a LAMP monoculture on their own individual servers?

If anything, Cloudflare can use economies of scale to staff a dedicated incident response team, assuming that at all times they are already compromised and trying to stop each attacker. They can invest in systemic least-privilege isolation. They can test the latest upstream versions of software in CI and deploy patches quickly and have 24/7 on-call staff to manage those deployments. I can't do any of that on the Raspberry Pi in my bedroom. If an intelligence agency or even a not-that-intelligent agency decides they want in, they just need to wait for the next zero-day in L, A, M, or P, and bet correctly that I'm not going to patch and restart my server until at least when I get home from work. Scaling this to everyone like me is just a matter of putting their exploit in a for loop.

And I do server maintenance as my day job. I've maintained a many-thousands-of-users shared web host that has been broken into. I certainly don't expect myself as a hobbyist to do a good job of maintaining my systems; what about the person who just wants to run a website and has zero professional experience being a sysadmin?

See my response over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577496 (summary: "now you have two problems")

1. One of the exciting things about this specific project is that it's likely to be no longer necessary to run an EC2 VM behind your Cloudflare site any more - any computation can live entirely within Cloudflare.

2. If you're running behind Cloudflare, one pretty straightforward and common thing is to configure your web server to only respond to requests from Cloudflare. Since Cloudflare has its own WAF that's updated by a skilled security team, this decreases your exposure - something like Shellshock or the Rails mass assignment vulnerability would get dropped at the Cloudflare level before it makes it to your origin server, and nobody else can send you HTTP requests.

(At that point you can configure your machine for SSH keys only and reduce your attack surface to pre-authentication OpenSSH vulnerabilities.)

So I don't think you have two problems if you use Cloudflare. You are trading off one problem for another, yes, but for most people that's the right tradeoff.

Sure. If you make Cloudflare your hosting provider, yes, then you're down one exposure point.

However, the risk I was talking about was not things like CVEs that random people are scanning for, but the spectre of state actors (or similar) compromising an entire provider. That applies to both AWS and Cloudflare, so if you use both, your risk is higher. (Or perhaps more importantly, the risk for your users is higher.)

It sounds to me like you'd be more interested in my other project: https://sandstorm.io

I genuinely do not think that the risk of a state actor persistently compromising Cloudflare is higher than the risk of a state actor persistently compromising the average self-hosted LAMP site. Or, in other words, I think it is a lot more likely that your website and mine (I also self-host but just for laziness/familiarity reasons) are already compromised by state actors and have been for years without us noticing (how would we?) than that Cloudflare is already compromising without them noticing.

The cost to a state actor to mass-exploit a random 0-day on hobbyist targets, set up a persistent back door, and leave is very low. The benefit is low, too, but there's no real reason why they shouldn't do it just in case they end up needing it ever. And the risk is low because they look just like "random people."

It is noteworthy that Cloudflare's CEO thought it was inherently wrong that he could effectively take a website off the Internet that he didn't like.

That's, at least, a massively better position on censorship than many other web companies, like Google, who explicitly believes they should remove websites they don't like from the Internet.

Dude, Cloudflare is just a hosting company, the internet would carry on fine without them. I'm not sure why NYTimes is losing their rag over their long-overdue decision to take down a Nazi site. The famous nazi site is still up, so the internet continues to be place where you can post incitement to genocide - thank goodness!

If you want to rag on Cloudflare as a shabby internet citizen, ask why they provide DDoS protection services while also hosting most DDoS-for-hire sites: https://www.google.com/search?q=booter

Aren’t they improving, though? They open-sourced a quantum resistant TLS implementation.

They can improve compared to their past performance, but they are strictly an incredibly negative influence on the Internet.

I agree with that. I should admit that they’re much better at PR than they are at doing the right thing.

Let's not forget also scihub https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16310230

This was in compliance with a court order. I, for one, am still relatively appreciative corporations can't go around willy-nilly refusing to obey legal orders from the government.

If you have a problem with specific orders of our government, the correct avenue of upset is with them, or, should they be unwilling to change their position, by voting.

The prospect of scihub dying is terrifying, and scihub helped to push in that direction.

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