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Comment by luastoned | Hacker News Reader

I've had no issues with wildcard certs and Cloudflare as my DNS provider.

You're OK giving your browsing history to Cloudflare?

I think he meant that his site is using cloudflare as its dns provider, not his personal computer.

The parent comment is reffering to the fact that they use CloudFlare to host DNS for the domains they control. That has nothing to do with the DNS resolvers their computers use (CloudFlare is certainly a reasonable choice there though... unless you don't use DNS at all, you have to trust someone)

Ok. But if they use Cloudflare, which MITMs traffic, all their users data is in plaintext to Cloudflare. Which leaks not only history, but also logins/passwords of site users.

My beef with CF is that I can not see which sites are behind CF.

Cloudflare has very specifically owned IPs and a number of tell tales to show that a site is behind it. Why do you have beef when it's practically dead simple to see that a site is protected by cloudflare. There's zero obfuscation.

Please, how exactly in browser I can see it?

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/claire/fgbpcgddpmj... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cloudflare-cl... Are two ways I found with a very quick Google search.

Well, thanks, but as I thought, its not that easy. First one is by CF themselves, no source :) Second is not used and not working. And nothing for Safari.

So some thing you can look for in a request:

  * `server: cloudflare` - Although CloudFlare uses a nginx, they report 
    themselves properly in the server header
  * `Cookie: _cfudid:*` - CloudFlare uses the cookie header to identify 
    users and prevent abuse. If you delete this cookie too many times,
    your IP is flagged by CloudFlare and you may receive an interstitial 
    blocking you from accessing a site.
  * IP Ranges: https://www.cloudflare.com/ips-v4 and 
    https://www.cloudflare.com/ips-v6 - CloudFlare owns the routing 
    to these IP addresses. If you want, setup some Firewall Rules to block 
    access to these ranges.

All in all, CloudFlare is probably the least of your worries. You might want to do some investigation on your ISP, some of which MITM and track any insecure content.

No joke. CloudFlare is near the bottom of my list of worries. I'm most concerned about my bank. They know goddamn everything about my spending history, and it's a complete treasure trove of data because it actually shows where I spend money.

I'm second most concerned about my ISP. They see every outgoing connection I make, and have no trouble tying it all back to me.

Cloudflare is... just not that big a deal. Are you concerned about Microsoft being able to MITM every connection to a site hosted on Azure? Amazon being able to MITM every connection made to AWS? Google being able to MITM every connection made to GCE?

"Yes" is a fair answer, but it means you're using a minuscule fraction of the available internet. Otherwise I don't really see the need to pick on Cloudflare. They're doing exactly what the company that's using them asked them to do (and getting paid for it too...)

> doing exactly what the company that's using them asked them to do

But how do I, website user, can know it? Given how many sites are served by CF, my private, decrypted, data can be aggregated and I would have no clue.

For ISPs use VPN. And I doubt (seriously) AWS (Azure) has means to do MITM, reading private keys from virtual machines? cmon.

Banking is a real bitch, agree :)

How many people using AWS, GCP or Azure are terminating TLS on their instances, instead of on the offered load-balancing services? How many services run (partially) not in VMs, but on PaaS (e.g. App Engine), load data directly from storage services (e.g. Firebase or S3), ...

We've told you several times how to know it as a user. You just conveniently are skipping over it..

You posted link to source for Claire after making this comment. I said thanks above.

Personally I trust that GDPR and its potentially enormous fines provide sufficient economic incentive for these big cloud companies to do the right thing.

That is to say I now believe that not only are Google, Cloudflare, Amazon not proactively sniffing traffic, but also that they'll have invested a massive amount of money making sure it's really hard to do undetected.

Of course I also fully expect that any one of them would give me up to law enforcement iff compelled by a court.

>And I doubt (seriously) AWS (Azure) has means to do MITM, reading private keys from virtual machines? cmon.

that's only if the website(s) are only using their IaaS offerings (which I doubt because they're crazy expensive compared to DO or vultr) and not their PaaS offerings. With PaaS (think heroku), they terminate the SSL and control the software for the http server, not you.

Even the IaaS offerings have widely-used load balancing services that terminate SSL.

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/

https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/application-gatew...

Today, data is the new oil. If you have a legal tap to people's data - you're valued hundreds of billions.

Google and Facebook have legal taps, users willingly provide their chats, emails, links, likes, photos, connections, locations, because its great service and its free. Both are Ad companies by main revenue, and its vital for them to use people's data.

AWS, Azure, Apple are not Ad companies, their main revenue is paid infrastructure, paid software and paid hardware. Their customers are not users, but companies. Reputation risks of openly using the data tap themselves will ruin existing revenue. What companies doing with users data is not their concern. Apple is an exception, with closed ecosystem, strong privacy and security and main income from hardware.

Cloudflare is something in between. They provide reverse proxy services, where your little site sits behind huge wall, for free. Income comes from paid WAF security features and ability to upload to CF your own SSL certs. In any case, you have to allow MITM of people's data.

Incentive for CF to use user's decrypted data is huge - it may shoot it up to ranks of Google and Facebook, to $100x Billions. So I have my doubts if that data is not being harvested.

I think I've said too much already, shutting up :)

> Cloudflare is... just not that big a deal. Are you concerned about Microsoft being able to MITM every connection to a site hosted on Azure? Amazon being able to MITM every connection made to AWS? Google being able to MITM every connection made to GCE?

It's not just Cloudflare themselves though. It's everyone else on the open Internet between the Cloudflare edge node and the site I actually wanted to connect to.

I'm not too worried about the parties that the site operator has a direct contractual relationship with, but traffic from Cloudflare could be going unencrypted to literally anyone with an AS number.

> You might want to do some investigation on your ISP

Doesn't most ISPs have to live up to certain laws about protecting the customers? I think those regulations are much more strict than what is required of CloudFlare.

Incorrect, the source is freely available, :).

https://github.com/cloudflare/claire

well done, my bad :)

> Ok. But if they use Cloudflare, which MITMs traffic, all their users data is in plaintext to Cloudflare.

Using Cloudflare for DNS, and only DNS, doesn't subject you to this.

If you decide to use their reverse proxy features, then sure, the MITM criticism applies.

That's optional though, right? IIRC, you could still have SSL termination occur on your end but you lose tons of features which would require CF MiTM.

Yes, that's optional.

> My beef with CF is that I can not see which sites are behind CF.

Sites behind CF usually include two headers in the responses: cf-ray and expect-ct.

If you see these headers, it's almost certain the response is coming from CF. So its likely those extensions are doing that, perhaps you might be able to verify the source code.

If the thought of connecting to a site hosted by Cloudflare absolutely disgusts you. Vist https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/ for a list of IPs that you can block.

Yes, thanks, I knew about headers and ips. Disgust is too strong word, aware is better :) some info may be sensitive and it goes in plaintext via CF. Its time to write my first extention, sigh.

All content delivery networks have this limitation. Not sure why you're targeting Cloudflare specifically.

No reason. Maybe because they have good PR and offer 'free' SSL, which many just take. I'm unaware of market size of other CDNs.

Do other CDNs offer free plans with SSL?

That has nothing to do with someone's browsing history...

Seems like you just have an issue with CloudFlare, and will keep changing the subject.

CF is in unique position to aggregate decrypted data from all users of many websites, attracted by 'free' plan with provided SSL.

This is against the whole idea of SSL, a closed tunnel between users and websites, so yes, I have an issue.

Plus many users set their DNS resolvers to CF DNS, browsing history goes here.

Let's Encrypt effectively shoots a hole--and this is a good thing--in the idea that TLS is for a meaningful kind of identification and establishes once and for all that the primary reason for TLS is for secured communication across the open internet.

And...that's it. CloudFlare operates in this spirit. It does not route traffic from its edge nodes across the open internet. It routes it across its private network.

So, no, it's not against "the whole idea of SSL"; it's what you have decided the idea of SSL is and nobody else on the internet really agrees with.

The amount of disingenuity you're hucking in this thread is pretty gross and you should stop.

CloudFlare can be used purely for DNS -- in which case they are one of the better DNS services because they have an API that almost everyone supports.

But you are completely correct that running a CDN (HTTP or HTTPS) requires you to MITM everything. The same complaint applies to Akamai, Level 3, or any other CDN you can name. It definitely is a problem, but not one of CloudFlare's own making.

It would be a fair criticism of CloudFlare to say that they've made their defaults tend towards MITM even though it is very likely that most websites don't actually need a CDN -- meaning that they are MITM-ing more traffic than they need to. And they have had pretty bad bugs in the past that revealed large amounts of private data that was sent over TLS but was MITM'd by them[1].

I do agree that CloudFlare being so central to so many large websites is a problem though. I just don't agree that this discounts their use as a purely-DNS service.

[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-c...

I'm not alone, praise be. Lol :)

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