Announcing Custom DLP profiles

Introduction

Where does sensitive data live? Who has access to that data? How do I know if that data has been improperly shared or leaked? These questions keep many IT and security administrators up at night. The goal of data loss prevention (DLP) is to give administrators the desired visibility and control over their sensitive data.

We shipped the general availability of DLP in September 2022, offering Cloudflare One customers better protection of their sensitive data. With DLP, customers can identify sensitive data in their corporate traffic, evaluate the intended destination of the data, and then allow or block it accordingly -- with details logged as permitted by your privacy and sovereignty requirements. We began by offering customers predefined detections for identifier numbers (e.g. Social Security #s) and financial information (e.g. credit card #s). Since then, nearly every customer has asked:

“When can I build my own detections?”

Most organizations care about credit card numbers, which use standard patterns that are easily detectable. But the data patterns of intellectual property or trade secrets vary widely between industries and companies, so customers need a way to detect the loss of their unique data. This can include internal project Continue reading

Pin, Unpin, and why Rust needs them

Using async Rust libraries is usually easy. It's just like using normal Rust code, with a little async or .await here and there. But writing your own async libraries can be hard. The first time I tried this, I got really confused by arcane, esoteric syntax like T: ?Unpin and Pin<&mut Self>. I had never seen these types before, and I didn't understand what they were doing. Now that I understand them, I've written the explainer I wish I could have read back then. In this post, we're gonna learn

• What Futures are
• What self-referential types are
• Why they were unsafe
• How Pin/Unpin made them safe
• Using Pin/Unpin to write tricky nested futures

What are Futures?

A few years ago, I needed to write some code which would take some async function, run it and collect some metrics about it, e.g. how long it took to resolve. I wanted to write a type TimedWrapper that would work like this:

// Some async function, e.g. polling a URL with [https://docs.rs/reqwest]
// Remember, Rust functions do nothing until you .await them, so this isn't
// actually making a HTTP request yet.
let async_fn = reqwest::get("http://adamchalmers.com");

// Wrap the  Continue reading

Highly available and highly scalable Cloudflare tunnels

Starting today, we’re thrilled to announce you can run the same tunnel from multiple instances of cloudflared simultaneously. This enables graceful restarts, elastic auto-scaling, easier Kubernetes integration, and more reliable tunnels.

What is Cloudflare Tunnel?

I work on Cloudflare Tunnel, a product our customers use to connect their services and private networks to Cloudflare without poking holes in their firewall. Tunnel connections are managed by cloudflared, a tool that runs in your environment and connects your services to the Internet while ensuring that all its traffic goes through Cloudflare.

Say you have some local service (a website, an API, or a TCP server), and you want to securely expose it to the Internet using a Cloudflare Tunnel. First, download cloudflared, which is a “connector” that connects your local service to the Internet through Cloudflare. You can then connect that service to Cloudflare and generate a DNS entry with a single command:

cloudflared tunnel create --name mytunnel --url http://localhost:8080 --hostname example.com

This creates a tunnel called “mytunnel”, and configures your DNS to map example.com to that tunnel. Then cloudflared connects to the Cloudflare network. When the Cloudflare network receives an incoming request for example.com, it looks up Continue reading

Many services, one cloudflared

I work on the Argo Tunnel team, and we make a program called cloudflared, which lets you securely expose your web service to the Internet while ensuring that all its traffic goes through Cloudflare.

Say you have some local service (a website, an API, a TCP server, etc), and you want to securely expose it to the internet using Argo Tunnel. First, you run cloudflared, which establishes some long-lived TCP connections to the Cloudflare edge. Then, when Cloudflare receives a request for your chosen hostname, it proxies the request through those connections to cloudflared, which in turn proxies the request to your local service. This means anyone accessing your service has to go through Cloudflare, and Cloudflare can do caching, rewrite parts of the page, block attackers, or build Zero Trust rules to control who can reach your application (e.g. users with a @corp.com email). Previously, companies had to use VPNs or firewalls to achieve this, but Argo Tunnel aims to be more flexible, more secure, and more scalable than the alternatives.

Some of our larger customers have deployed hundreds of services with Argo Continue reading