Cloudflare is now powering Microsoft Edge Secure Network

Between third-party cookies that track your activity across websites, to highly targeted advertising based on your IP address and browsing data, it's no secret that today’s Internet browsing experience isn’t as private as it should be. Here at Cloudflare, we believe everyone should be able to browse the Internet free of persistent tracking and prying eyes.

That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Microsoft Edge to provide a fast and secure VPN, right in the browser. Users don’t have to install anything new or understand complex concepts to get the latest in network-level privacy: Edge Secure Network VPN is available on the latest consumer version of Microsoft Edge in most markets, and automatically comes with 5 GB of data. Just enable the feature by going to [Microsoft Edge Settings & more (…) > Browser essentials, and click Get VPN for free]. See Microsoft’s Edge Secure Network page for more details.

Cloudflare’s Privacy Proxy platform isn’t your typical VPN

To take a step back: a VPN is a way in which the Internet traffic leaving your device is tunneled through an intermediary server operated by a provider – in this case, Cloudflare! There are many important pieces that Continue reading

Donning a MASQUE: building a new protocol into Cloudflare WARP

When we originally announced WARP, we knew we were launching a product that was different from other VPNs. Cloudflare has not only hundreds more data centers than your typical VPN provider, but also a unique purview into the adoption of open Internet standards. The confluence of these two factors have led us to today’s announcement: support for MASQUE, a cutting-edge new protocol for the beta version of our consumer WARP iOS app.

MASQUE is a set of mechanisms that extend HTTP/3 and leverage the unique properties of the QUIC transport protocol to efficiently proxy IP and UDP traffic. Most importantly, it will make your Internet browsing experience faster and more stable without sacrificing privacy.

Like many products at Cloudflare, we’re offering this first as a free, consumer offering. Once we’ve had an opportunity to learn from what it’s like to operate MASQUE on mobile devices, at scale, we plan to integrate it into our Zero Trust enterprise product suite.

We’re not saying goodbye to Wireguard

When we first built WARP we chose to go with Wireguard for many reasons – among them, simplicity. This is where Wireguard shines: ~4,000 lines of code that use public-key cryptography to create an encrypted Continue reading

Privacy Gateway: a privacy preserving proxy built on Internet standards

If you’re running a privacy-oriented application or service on the Internet, your options to provably protect users’ privacy are limited. You can minimize logs and data collection but even then, at a network level, every HTTP request needs to come from somewhere. Information generated by HTTP requests, like users’ IP addresses and TLS fingerprints, can be sensitive especially when combined with application data.

Meaningful improvements to your users’ privacy require a change in how HTTP requests are sent from client devices to the server that runs your application logic. This was the motivation for Privacy Gateway: a service that relays encrypted HTTP requests and responses between a client and application server. With Privacy Gateway, Cloudflare knows where the request is coming from, but not what it contains, and applications can see what the request contains, but not where it comes from. Neither Cloudflare nor the application server has the full picture, improving end-user privacy.

We recently deployed Privacy Gateway for Flo Health Inc., a leading female health app, for the launch of their Anonymous Mode. With Privacy Gateway in place, all request data for Anonymous Mode users is encrypted between the app user and Flo, which prevents Flo Continue reading

Private by design: building privacy-preserving products with Cloudflare’s Privacy Edge

When Cloudflare was founded, our value proposition had three pillars: more secure, more reliable, and more performant. Over time, we’ve realized that a better Internet is also a more private Internet, and we want to play a role in building it.

User awareness and expectations of and for privacy are higher than ever, but we believe that application developers and platforms shouldn’t have to start from scratch. We’re excited to introduce Privacy Edge – Code Auditability, Privacy Gateway, Privacy Proxy, and Cooperative Analytics – a suite of products that make it easy for site owners and developers to build privacy into their products, by default.

Building network-level privacy into the foundations of app infrastructure

As you’re browsing the web every day, information from the networks and apps you use can expose more information than you intend. When accumulated over time, identifiers like your IP address, cookies, browser and device characteristics create a unique profile that can be used to track your browsing activity. We don’t think this status quo is right for the Internet, or that consumers should have to understand the complex ecosystem of third-party trackers to maintain privacy. Instead, we’ve been working on technologies that encourage and enable Continue reading

1.1.1.1 + WARP: More features, still private

It’s a Saturday night. You open your browser, looking for nearby pizza spots that are open. If the search goes as intended, your browser will show you results that are within a few miles, often based on the assumed location of your IP address. At Cloudflare, we affectionately call this type of geolocation accuracy the “pizza test”. When you use a Cloudflare product that sits between you and the Internet (for example, WARP), it’s one of the ways we work to balance user experience and privacy. Too inaccurate and you’re getting pizza places from a neighboring country; too accurate and you’re reducing the privacy benefits of obscuring your location.

With that in mind, we’re excited to announce two major improvements to our 1.1.1.1 + WARP apps: first, an improvement to how we ensure search results and other geographically-aware Internet activity work without compromising your privacy, and second, a larger network with more locations available to WARP+ subscribers, powering even speedier connections to our global network.

A better Internet browsing experience for every WARP user

When we originally built the 1.1.1.1+ WARP mobile app, we wanted to create a consumer-friendly way to connect to Continue reading