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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

As a generally happy Cloudflare customer, a Cloudflare VPN makes me deeply uneasy. (Yes, I know Warp has been around for a while.) Using it means Cloudflare owns a huge chunk of your Internet traffic end to end and decrypted, a uniquely powerful position to be in. And this is going to be default on in Edge according to TFA, even though it’s only applied to plain HTTP sites by default at the moment.

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People are fools if think there isn't a Room 641A in Cloudflare, except it's a lot better since web service operators willingly handed over all their private keys and therefore user data.

Browsers already want to send every domain you visit to cloudflare via DoH.

Other options of securing DNS included "just" encrypting traffic to DNS server. But no, they decided to centralize sending DNS records via HTTPS

While I agree that it is concerning, WARP doesn't decrypt your traffic unless you sign in to ZeroTrust, enable it in your dashboard and install their CA.

Not much you can do about them having decrypted traffic for sites that use them.

> having decrypted traffic for sites that use them

Yes, that’s the huge chunk I’m talking about, and when you use them as your VPN they can effortlessly trace that decrypted traffic to you.

How is that different from not using a VPN?

When you don’t use a VPN, at least your traffic to Cloudflare doesn’t carry a unique ID of yours. Effort is required to correlate your traffic, especially if you are CGNAT’ed and share an IP with others, or have a dynamic IP that changes frequently.

Its not, that's the point.

It’s not for one party. The VPN protects your traffic from any party other than Cloudflare. Exactly as it would with any VPN.

Https is among the most broken ideas in the history of CS. I remember the first time I really learned about it and I went like it can't be this stupid.

Most Internet traffic today between A and B is decrypted by C because of this.

What are you talking about?

Https is a wrapper around http. The result is that any service that needs any http information can decrypt all https traffic. So on the web, passwords, apikeys, personal information and so is in general decrypted by a third party, Fastly, Akamai, Cloudflare and so on.

That is entirely untrue. HTTPS is just HTTP encrypted with TLS. The only parties that can decrypt the traffic are the people with the session keys: you and the website you’re visiting.

You are plain wrong.

How so?

Cause requests are often sent through any of the large third-party layer 7 reverse proxy networks that sits between the user and the origin host.

All they see is ciphertext unless they’re terminating TLS and forwarding your traffic on to the target website.

They are terminating TLS.

Not sure how this is a problem with HTTPS, then. It’s like complaining that AES encryption is broken because you have away your keys to a bunch of people.

It is a problem with HTTPS as it removes capabilities of HTTP without offering any other solution except terminating TLS.

What you’ve said so far has been generally confused and incorrect. I would suggest doing more research about HTTPS.

Says the guy who did not even know that all these reverse proxies like Cloudflare does TLS termination on the edge.

You’re glossing over that these third parties C are contracted trusted parties of entity B and thus for B’s purposes are considered part of B.

HTTPS and transport security isn’t a broken idea.

Standardized content security has been tried in many contexts and has typically been even less secure unless it’s for long lived opaque media, like S/MIME for emails. Structured data like XML security has been abysmal.

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