Why Cloudflare Is a Threat to the Internet Privacy
2. It's impossible to use Cloudflare proxy without giving up encryption of data. They are a man-in-the-middle that has access to unencrypted information of all the traffic they proxy. (Yes, even with Full-Strict/Keyless SSL)
3. Of the remaining 80% of internet traffic, 43% comes from Netflix, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, none of which seems to be using Cloudflare, which makes Cloudflare the ultimate tool to break encryption on distributed servers. Only 37% of the internet traffic is routed outside these major tech companies. [3]
4. In July 2021, a random guy discovered a vulnerability on Cloudflare's cdnjs that allowed a complete takeover of the CDN, which is estimated to be used by 12.7% of websites. The NSA has a whole division dedicated to discovering and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities on systems. Even if Cloudflare is not willingly feeding unencrypted traffic to the NSA, it is a single point of surveillance that, if compromised, breaks the whole encryption of a good portion of the internet. [4], [5]
5. Cloudflare follows a freemium pricing plan. In 2016, Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince said in an interview that only 4% to 5% of the websites they protect are paying customers. The cost of maintaining Cloudflare infrastructure for the remaining 95% of customers that use it for free is unclear, as Cloudflare does not run ads on the sites it protects. [6]
6. In the same interview, he mentions that the initial impetus for Cloudflare came after an acquisition by the Department of Homeland Security of his previous project, Project Honeypot, in 2008, which demonstrates that the government was at least aware of it since the beginning. [6]
---
*Bibliography:*
[1] https://twitter.com/AxelrodG/status/1447938954758705155
[2] https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2017/cloudflare-introduces-argo-a-virtual-backbone-for-a-faster-more-reliable-internet/#:~:text=Cloudflare%20handles%20more%20than%2010%20percent%20of%20all%20HTTP/HTTPS%20Internet%20traffic%2C
[3] https://www.sandvine.com/blog/netflix-vs.-google-vs.-amazon-vs.-facebook-vs.-microsoft-vs.-apple-traffic-share-of-internet-brands-global-internet-phenomena-spotlight
[4] https://blog.ryotak.me/post/cdnjs-remote-code-execution-en/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations
[6] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-37348016
25 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 46.6 ms ] thread>"Cloudflare's roots go back to 2004 when Mr Prince and Cloudflare co-founder Lee Holloway were working on a computer industry project they called Honey Pot.
>The idea was that people with websites signed up for free, to install software which then tracked people who sent unsolicited emails."
Cloudflare has become much worse over the last 3 years due to increased adoption and default deployments by government services like congress.gov and institutions like science.org. These websites have been effectively blocked for millions of people in a multi-year on-going denial of service by cloudflare. I can't run the required bleeding edge spyware javascript so I don't get to access my own government's sites.
All that's needed is a minimum of 36 independent boolean values to identify you in the global population. 72 is more than enough to gain high confidence in birthday attack problems at 36 bits. How many hardware-unique bits can be siphoned with web assembly and javascript?
> These websites have been effectively blocked for millions of people in a multi-year on-going denial of service by cloudflare.
This is a great way to frame the issue. This is a DoS. But, it is a DoS against the client. And, the operators of sites that choose to front with cloudflare et al, given the choice of DoS against their servers or flipping the bird to a portion of their users, have chosen to make their own lives easier.
It is not just Cloudflare, though. My credit union uses Akamai who for a period of several months would terminate my connection during the TLS handshake, if I tried to connect from a connection tethered to my phone (cloudflare hates tethering/CGNAT too; cloudflare kept me from accessing my health dept's website during the pandemic from a tethered connection [my only Internet access at home]).
Is it bad this just makes me want to invest in them? :s :(
I'm pretty sure i didn't do anything, and they just randomly decide to brake check people with adblockers and the like even if you disable them after.
Especially given that they supply resources to 3 of the other companies in the list. I would love to see other reports on those numbers.
Every day I get at least one spam SMS with a link in it. That link is invariably registered with Cloudflare with "hostmaster privacy" and hidden behind a Cloudflare CDN so there is no way to track down the owners.
People have tried to contact Cloudflare to block these criminals, but Cloudflare forwards all complaints to /dev/null.
Behaviour like this seems pro-freedom, but it is the diametric opposite of the type of Internet we used to have in the 1990s where people were people, and bad actors could be named and shamed.
CloudFlare is pro-bot, pro-phish, pro-crime, and pro-spam.
Cloudflare makes money from the free traffic by caching it. Caching dramatically reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the backbone, which saves ISPs a ton of money, and improves latency for their customers.
From S-1 filing, under "Our Business Model" section:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477333/000119312519...
> Given the large customer base we have and the immense amount of Internet traffic that we manage, we are able to negotiate mutually beneficial agreements with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that allow us to place our equipment directly in their data centers, which dramatically drives down our bandwidth and co-location expenses.
The peering and co-location partnerships also have a secondary effect of expanding Cloudflare's network, which allows Cloudflare to sell services on top of that, at large scale, with low latencies.
If the big advertisers would correlate the reduced reach of their campaigns with the increased prevalence of Cloudflare and their obstacles to user access, they should be able to drive the market to alternatives which preserve access to the entire world.
There's no way they should pay as much to advertise on sites handled by Cloudflare as it is worth to reach the whole internet.
Sooner or later each percent that Cloudflare grows, will represent a resulting percent less that it would make sense for an advertiser to pay when supporting the website.
This is the percentages of websites using various reverse proxy services. This, however, is different from the 43% of internet traffic coming from Netflix, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple metric. That is a traffic weighted metric (not # of websites).
As many of Cloudflare's customers are tiny little websites with no traffic, its misleading to say "only 37% of traffic is routed outside these major tech companies"