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I've never quite understood this idea that Cloudflare is an MITM. An MITM is by definition a covert intermediary. Cloudflare is a service provider that's deliberately employed by a site operator. If CF is a MITM then so is AWS, GCP, and every other CDN service provider.

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I guess MITM has a specific (adversarial) definition and I've bastardized it. The only cloud load balancers that I use are layer 4, so they're not unwrapping HTTPS for me, but your point is taken.

> An MITM is by definition a covert intermediary.

I've never thought that it had to be covert or even nefarious to be a MITM. It's a man-in-the-middle if it's sitting between two endpoints talking to each other and intercepting the data stream.

For instance, I proxy all of my web traffic in order to be able to filter my HTTPS streams. It's neither covert nor nefarious, but is still a man-in-the-middle. It's just not a man-in-the-middle attack.

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