The @Cloudflare team just pushed a change that improves our network's performance significantly, especially for particularly slow outlier requests. How much faster? We estimate we're saving the Internet ~54 years *per day* of time we'd all otherwise be waiting for sites to load.

— Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) June 28, 2018

10 million websites, apps and APIs use Cloudflare to give their users a speed boost. At peak we serve more than 10 million requests a second across our 151 data centers. Over the years we’ve made many modifications to our version of NGINX to handle our growth. This is blog post is about one of them.

How NGINX works

NGINX is one of the programs that popularized using event loops to solve the C10K problem. Every time a network event comes in (a new connection, a request, or a notification that we can send more data, etc.) NGINX wakes up, handles the event, and then goes back to do whatever it needs to do (which may be handling other events). When an event arrives, data associated with the event is already ready, which allows NGINX to efficiently handle many requests simultaneously without waiting.

num_events = epoll_wait(epfd, /*returned=*/events, events_len, /*timeout=*/-1);
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In April, we wrote about Web Cache Deception attacks, and how our customers can avoid them using origin configuration.

Read that blog post to learn about how to configure your website, and for those who are not able to do that, how to disable caching for certain URIs to prevent this type of attacks. Since our previous blog post, we have looked for but have not seen any large scale attacks like this in the wild.

Today, we have released a tool to help our customers make sure only assets that should be cached are being cached.

A brief re-introduction to Web Cache Deception attack

Recall that the Web Cache Deception attack happens when an attacker tricks a user into clicking a link in the format of http://www.example.com/newsfeed/foo.jpg, when http://www.example.com/newsfeed is the location of a dynamic script that returns different content for different users. For some website configurations (default in Apache but not in nginx), this would invoke /newsfeed with PATH_INFO set to /foo.jpg. If http://www.example.com/newsfeed/foo.jpg does not return the proper Cache-Control headers to tell a web cache not to cache the content, web caches may decide to cache Continue reading