Continuing to Improve our IPFS Gateway

When we launched our InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) gateway last year we were blown away by the positive reception. Countless people gave us valuable suggestions for improvement and made open-source contributions to make serving content through our gateway easy (many captured in our developer docs). Since then, our gateway has grown to regularly handle over a thousand requests per second, and has become the primary access point for several IPFS websites.

We’re committed to helping grow IPFS and have taken what we have learned since our initial release to improve our gateway. So far, we’ve done the following:

Automatic Cache Purge

One of the ways we tried to improve the performance of our gateway when we initially set it up was by setting really high cache TTLs. After all, content on IPFS is largely meant to be static. The complaint we heard though, was that site owners were frustrated at wait times upwards of several hours for changes to their website to propagate.

The way an IPFS gateway knows what content to serve when it receives a request for a given domain is by looking up the value of a TXT record associated with the domain – the DNSLink Continue reading

Securing Certificate Issuance using Multipath Domain Control Validation

This blog post is part of Crypto Week 2019.

Trust on the Internet is underpinned by the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). PKI grants servers the ability to securely serve websites by issuing digital certificates, providing the foundation for encrypted and authentic communication.

Certificates make HTTPS encryption possible by using the public key in the certificate to verify server identity. HTTPS is especially important for websites that transmit sensitive data, such as banking credentials or private messages. Thankfully, modern browsers, such as Google Chrome, flag websites not secured using HTTPS by marking them “Not secure,” allowing users to be more security conscious of the websites they visit.

This blog post introduces a new, free tool Cloudflare offers to CAs so they can further secure certificate issuance. But before we dive in too deep, let’s talk about where certificates come from.

Certificate Authorities

Certificate Authorities (CAs) are the institutions responsible for issuing certificates.

When issuing a certificate for any given domain, they use Domain Control Validation (DCV) to verify that the entity requesting a certificate for the domain is the legitimate owner of the domain. With DCV the domain owner:

1. creates a DNS resource record for a domain;
2. uploads a document to Continue reading

League of Entropy: Not All Heroes Wear Capes

To kick-off Crypto Week 2019, we are really excited to announce a new solution to a long-standing problem in cryptography. To get a better understanding of the technical side behind this problem, please refer to the next post for a deeper dive.

Everything from cryptography to big money lottery to quantum mechanics requires some form of randomness. But what exactly does it mean for a number to be randomly generated and where does the randomness come from?

Generating randomness dates back three thousand years, when the ancients rolled “the bones” to determine their fate. Think of lotteries-- seems simple, right? Everyone buys their tickets, chooses six numbers, and waits for an official to draw them randomly from a basket. Sounds like a foolproof solution. And then in 1980, the host of the Pennsylvania lottery drawing was busted for using weighted balls to choose the winning number. This lesson, along with the need of other complex systems for generating random numbers spurred the creation of random number generators.

Just like a lottery game selects random numbers unpredictably, a random number generator is a device or software responsible for generating sequences of numbers in an unpredictable manner. As the need for Continue reading

Inside the Entropy

Randomness, randomness everywhere;
Nor any verifiable entropy.

Generating random outcomes is an essential part of everyday life; from lottery drawings and constructing competitions, to performing deep cryptographic computations. To use randomness, we must have some way to 'sample' it. This requires interpreting some natural phenomenon (such as a fair dice roll) as an event that generates some random output. From a computing perspective, we interpret random outputs as bytes that we can then use in algorithms (such as drawing a lottery) to achieve the functionality that we want.

The sampling of randomness securely and efficiently is a critical component of all modern computing systems. For example, nearly all public-key cryptography relies on the fact that algorithms can be seeded with bytes generated from genuinely random outcomes.

In scientific experiments, a random sampling of results is necessary to ensure that data collection measurements are not skewed. Until now, generating random outputs in a way that we can verify that they are indeed random has been very difficult; typically involving taking a variety of statistical measurements.

During Crypto week, Cloudflare is releasing a new public randomness beacon as part of the launch of the League of Entropy. The League of Entropy is Continue reading

Welcome to Crypto Week 2019

The Internet is an extraordinarily complex and evolving ecosystem. Its constituent protocols range from the ancient and archaic (hello FTP) to the modern and sleek (meet WireGuard), with a fair bit of everything in between. This evolution is ongoing, and as one of the most connected networks on the Internet, Cloudflare has a duty to be a good steward of this ecosystem. We take this responsibility to heart: Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. In this spirit, we are very proud to announce Crypto Week 2019.

Every day this week we’ll announce a new project or service that uses modern cryptography to build a more secure, trustworthy Internet. Everything we release this week will be free and immediately useful. This blog is a fun exploration of the themes of the week.

• Monday: Coming Soon
• Tuesday: Coming Soon
• Wednesday: Coming Soon
• Thursday: Coming Soon
• Friday: Coming Soon

The Internet of the Future

Many pieces of the Internet in use today were designed in a different era with different assumptions. The Internet’s success is based on strong foundations that support constant reassessment and improvement. Sometimes these improvements require deploying new protocols.

Performing an upgrade on a system Continue reading

Security Compliance at Cloudflare

Cloudflare believes trust is fundamental to helping build a better Internet. One way Cloudflare is helping our customers earn their users’ trust is through industry standard security compliance certifications and regulations.

Security compliance certifications are reports created by independent, third-party auditors that validate  and document a company’s commitment to security. These external auditors will conduct a rigorous review of a company’s technical environment and evaluate whether or not there are thorough controls - or safeguards - in place to protect the security, confidentiality, and availability of information stored and processed in the environment. SOC 2 was established by the American Institute of CPAs and is important to many of our U.S. companies, as it is a standardized set of requirements a company must meet in order to comply. Additionally, PCI and ISO 27001 are international standards. Cloudflare cares about achieving certifications because our adherence to these standards creates confidence to customers across the globe that we are committed to security. So, the Security team has been hard at work obtaining these meaningful compliance certifications.

Since the beginning of this year, we have been renewing our PCI DSS certification in February, achieving SOC 2 Type 1 compliance in March, obtaining Continue reading

A free Argo Tunnel for your next project

Argo Tunnel lets you expose a server to the Internet without opening any ports. The service runs a lightweight process on your server that creates outbound tunnels to the Cloudflare network. Instead of managing DNS, network, and firewall complexity, Argo Tunnel helps administrators serve traffic from their origin through Cloudflare with a single command.

We built Argo Tunnel to remove the burden of securing and connecting servers to the Internet. This new model makes it easier to run a service in multi-cloud and hybrid deployments by replacing manual and error-prone work with a process that adds intelligence to the last-mile between Cloudflare and your origins or clusters. However, the service was previously only available to users with Cloudflare accounts. We want to make Argo Tunnel more accessible for any project.

Starting today, any user, even those without a Cloudflare account, can try this new method of connecting their server to the Internet. Argo Tunnel can now be used in a free model that will create a new URL, known only to you, that will proxy traffic to your server. We’re excited to make connecting a server to the Internet more accessible for everyone.

What is Argo Tunnel?

Argo Tunnel replaces Continue reading

Project Galileo: the view from the front lines

Growing up in the age of technology has made it too easy for me to take the presence of the Internet for granted. It’s hard to imagine not being able to go online and connect with anyone in the world, whether I’m speaking with family members or following activists planning global rallies in support of a common cause. I find that as I forget the wonder of being connected, I become jaded. I imagine that many of you reading this blog feel the same way. I doubt you have gone a month, or even a week, this year without considering that the world might be better off without the Internet, or without parts of the Internet, or that your life would be better with a digital cleanse. Project Galileo is my antidote. For every person online who abuses their anonymity, there is an organization that literally could not fulfill their purpose without it. And they are doing amazing work.

Working with Participants

As program manager for Project Galileo, Cloudflare’s initiative to provide free services to vulnerable voices on the Internet, a large portion of my time is spent interacting with the project’s participants and partners. This includes a variety of Continue reading

Protecting Project Galileo websites from HTTP attacks

Yesterday, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of Project Galileo. More than 550 websites are part of this program, and they have something in common: each and every one of them has been subject to attacks in the last month. In this blog post, we will look at the security events we observed between the 23 April 2019 and 23 May 2019.

Project Galileo sites are protected by the Cloudflare Firewall and Advanced DDoS Protection which contain a number of features that can be used to detect and mitigate different types of attack and suspicious traffic. The following table shows how each of these features contributed to the protection of sites on Project Galileo.

Project Galileo: Lessons from 5 years of protecting the most vulnerable online

Today is the 5th anniversary of Cloudflare's Project Galileo. Through the Project, Cloudflare protects—at no cost—nearly 600 organizations around the world engaged in some of the most politically and artistically important work online. Because of their work, these organizations are attacked frequently, often with some of the fiercest cyber attacks we’ve seen.

Since it launched in 2014, we haven't talked about Galileo much externally because we worry that drawing more attention to these organizations may put them at increased risk. Internally, however, it's a source of pride for our whole team and is something we dedicate significant resources to. And, for me personally, many of the moments that mark my most meaningful accomplishments were born from our work protecting Project Galileo recipients.

The promise of Project Galileo is simple: Cloudflare will provide our full set of security services to any politically or artistically important organizations at no cost so long as they are either non-profits or small commercial entities. I'm still on the distribution list that receives an email whenever someone applies to be a Project Galileo participant, and those emails remain the first I open every morning.

The Project Galileo Backstory

Five years ago, Project Galileo was born Continue reading

Making progress in Cloudflare’s EMEA operations, and looking ahead to a bright future

Cloudflare’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) have seen great progress over the past few years and the future looks even brighter. I joined as Head of EMEA Sales, taking responsibility for our customer-facing activity across the region, just over a year ago. I am encouraged by what we are building while being even more motivated by what lies ahead for our customers, our partners and our employees.

Cloudflare has a rich history in EMEA where London was one of the earliest bases for both the company’s engineering and also its customer-facing activities. In the subsequent years, we have expanded our customer-facing activity to include coverage into all the major EMEA countries and regions. We’ve built up a team of professional sales and business development people, capable systems engineers, dedicated customer success managers, thoughtful marketeers and a responsive customer support team who serve our existing customers and develop new ones as a committed and focused team.

We work on developing brand awareness for Cloudflare and extending our reach into the market through communications, events and most of all through ongoing close engagement with customers, prospective customers and partners. We carry the Cloudflare mission of helping build a Continue reading

Why I’m helping Cloudflare build its partnerships worldwide

Cloudflare has always had an audacious mission: to help build a better Internet. From its inception, the company realized that a mission this big couldn’t be taken on alone. Such an undertaking would require the help of an extraordinary group of partners. Early in the company’s history, Cloudflare built strong relationships with many hosting providers to protect and accelerate internet traffic. And through the years, Cloudflare has continued to build some amazing Enterprise partnerships and strategic alliances.

As we continue to grow and foster our partner ecosystem, we are excited to announce Cloudflare’s next iteration of its Partner Program—to engage and enable an equally audacious set of partners that want to help build a better Internet, together.

I recently joined Cloudflare to run Global Channel Sales & Partnerships after spending over nine years at Google Cloud in various indirect and direct leadership roles. At Google, I witnessed the powerful impact that a strong partner ecosystem could have on solving complex organizational and societal problems. By combining innovative technologies provided by the manufacturer, with deep domain expertise provided by the partner, we delivered valuable industry solutions to our customers. And through this process, we helped our partners build valuable businesses, accelerate Continue reading

Cloudflare Partners: A New Program with New Partners

Many overlook a critical portion of the language in Cloudflare’s mission: “to help build a better Internet.” From the beginning, we knew a mission this bold, an undertaking of this magnitude, couldn’t be done alone. We could only help. To ultimately build a better Internet, it would take a diverse and engaged ecosystem of technologies, customers, partners, and end-users. Fortunately, we’ve been able to work with amazing partners as we’ve grown, and we are eager to announce new, specific programs to grow our ecosystem with an increasingly diverse set of partners.

Today, we’re excited to announce the latest iteration of our partnership program for solutions partners. These categories encompass resellers and referral partners, OEM partners, and the new partner services program. Over the past few years, we’ve grown and learned from some amazing partnerships, and want to bring those best practices to our latest partners at scale—to help them grow their business with Cloudflare’s global network.

Partner Program for Solution Partners

Every partner program out there has tiers, and Cloudflare’s program is no exception. However, our tiering was built to help our partners ramp up, accelerate and move fast. As Matt Harrell highlighted, we Continue reading

Announcing the New Cloudflare Partner Platform

When I first started at Cloudflare over two years ago, one of the first things I was tasked with was to help evolve our partner platform to support the changes in our service and the expanding needs of our partners and customers. Cloudflare’s existing partner platform was released in 2010. It is a testament to those who built it, that it was, and still is, in use today—but it was also clear that the landscape had substantially changed.

Since the launch of the existing partner platform, we had built and expanded multi-user access, and launched many new products: Argo, Load Balancing, and Cloudflare Workers, to name a few. Retrofitting the existing offering was not practical. Cloudflare needed a new partner platform that could meet the needs of partners and their customers.

As the team started to develop a new solution, we needed to find a partner who could keep us on the right path. The number of hypotheticals were infinite and we needed a first customer to ground ourselves. Lo and behold, not long after I had begun putting pen to paper, we found the perfect partner for the new platform.

The IBM Partnership

IBM was looking for a partner Continue reading

Enhancing the Optimizely Experimentation Platform with Cloudflare Workers

This is a joint post by Whelan Boyd, Senior Product Manager at Optimizely and Remy Guercio, Product Marketing Manager for Cloudflare Workers.

Experimentation is an important ingredient in driving business growth: whether you’re iterating on a product or testing new messaging, there’s no substitute for the data and insights gathered from conducting rigorous experiments in the wild.

Optimizely is the world’s leading experimentation platform, with thousands of customers worldwide running tests for over 140 million visitors daily. If Optimizely were a website, it would be the third most trafficked in the US.  And when it came time to experiment with reinvigorating their own platform, Optimizely chose Cloudflare Workers.

Improving Performance and Agility with Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers is a globally distributed serverless compute platform that runs across Cloudflare’s network of 180 locations worldwide. Workers are designed for flexibility, with many different use cases ranging from customizing configuration of Cloudflare services and features to building full, independent applications.

In this post, we’re going to focus on how Workers can be used to improve performance and increase agility for more complex applications. One of the key benefits of Workers is that they allow developers to move decision logic and data Continue reading

科技点燃未来，未来尽在指掌之间 — Cloudflare 与你共赏安全界 “奥斯卡” DEF CON China 1.0 大会

科技在发展，时代在进步，许多事情或许本质并没有改变，但呈现的方式已经日新月异，这或许就是我们常说的 — 未来。就像许多年前，我们还通过明信片和相册向亲友分享我们生活中的点点滴滴。许多年后，我们有了朋友圈、微博、Facebook、Instagram、抖音、各式博客。幼时还守着电视看着预录好的节目，接触外界的形形色色，现在我们透过直播的镜头，弹指间便能瞬息感受世界当下的脉动。

科技改变着我们，我们推动着未来

许多人都在电影中看到过极客指尖敲动，在数字的世界中急速驰骋的场景。然而现实生活中，这些人在哪儿不得而知。随着技术的发展，越来越多的年轻人加入了这个群体。在国外一直都有 DEF CON 这样的世界极客盛会。中国此前也还没有，直到去年 DEF CON 来到了中国，主办方斥巨资引进大会，想打造属于中国的技术社区，通过这样一个契机，将大家聚在一起，一同成长，最终构建一个属于中国自己的、真正的安全社区。于是，在 DEF CON 的名下，多了一个 DEF CON China。  

今年，DEF CON 经过一年的沉淀后，进入了正式版本 1.0，这个世界顶级的安全会议，在五月底，以 "Technology's Promise" — “科技点燃未来” 为主旨，于北京拉开了序幕，像是一位家长等待着 “孩子们” 一起过节。这个六一，还有什么能比来 DEF CON China 1.0 众乐乐更具意涵呢？

作为在中国地区的正式版本，DEF CON China 吸引了很多大咖前来参与，一直致力于网络安全的 Cloudflare，这次也前来共襄盛举，带来了最新的科技跟大家分享。

Cloudflare 的使命是建立一个更好的互联网

Cloudflare 成立于 2009 年，是一家跨国科技公司，在全球 80 个国家部有 180 个数据中心。我们的性能和安全服务协同工作，以减少网站、移动应用程序和端到端 API 的延迟，同时防御 DDoS 攻击、滥用机器人和数据泄露。

此次大会是 Cloudflare 在区域深耕的第一小步。相信随着时间的推移，越来越多的用户会认识并了解 Cloudflare，此而加入我们。点此启用免费帐户，立即体验更快更安全的网络：cloudflare.com/sign-up

人才招聘中

Cloudflare 具有全球视野、本地化洞见的团队期待构建更好的全球互联网未来。我们北京和全球的办公室都在招聘人才，欢迎有志一同的伙伴加入我们！cloudflare.com/careers

Technology’s Promise – Highlights from DEF CON China 1.0

DEF CON is one of the largest and oldest security conferences in the world. Last year, it launched a beta event in China in hopes of bringing the local security communities closer together. This year, the organizer made things official by introducing DEF CON China 1.0 with a promise to build a forum for China where everyone can gather, connect, and grow together.

Themed "Technology's Promise", DEF CON China kicked off on 5/30 in Beijing and attracted participants of all ages. Watching young participants test, play and tinker with new technologies with such curiosity and excitement absolutely warmed our hearts!

It was a pleasure to participate in DEF CON China 1.0 this year and connect with local communities. Great synergy as we exchanged ideas and learnings on cybersecurity topics. Did I mention we also spoiled ourselves with the warm hospitality, wonderful food, live music, and amazing crowd while in Beijing.

MultiCloud… flare

If you want to start an intense conversation in the halls of Cloudflare, try describing us as a "CDN". CDNs don't generally provide you with Load Balancing, they don't allow you to deploy Serverless Applications, and they certainly don't get installed onto your phone. One of the costs of that confusion is many people don't realize everything Cloudflare can do for people who want to operate in multiple public clouds, or want to operate in both the cloud and on their own hardware.

Load Balancing

Cloudflare has countless servers located in 180 data centers around the world. Each one is capable of acting as a Layer 7 load balancer, directing incoming traffic between origins wherever they may be. You could, for example, add load balancing between a set of machines you have in AWS' EC2, and another set you keep in Google Cloud.

This load balancing isn't just round-robining traffic. It supports weighting to allow you to control how much traffic goes to each cluster. It supports latency-based routing to automatically route traffic to the cluster which is closer (so adding geographic distribution can be as simple as spinning up machines). It even supports health checks, allowing it Continue reading

Just Write Code: Improving Developer Experience for Cloudflare Workers

We’re excited to announce that starting today, Cloudflare Workers® gets a CLI, new and improved docs, multiple scripts for everyone, the ability to run applications on workers.dev without bringing your own domain, and a free tier to make experimentation easier than ever. We are building the serverless platform of the future, and want you to build your application on it, today. In this post, we’ll elaborate on what a serverless platform of the future looks like, how it changes today’s paradigms, and our commitment to making building on it a great experience.

Three years ago, I was interviewing with Cloudflare for a Solutions Engineering role. As a part of an interview assignment, I had to set up an origin behind Cloudflare on my own  domain. I spent my weekend, frustrated and lost in configurations, trying to figure out how to set up an EC2 instance, connect to it over IPv6, and install NGINX on Ubuntu 16.4 just so I could end up with a static site with a picture of my cat on it. I have a computer science degree, and spent my career up until that point as a software engineer — building this simple app was Continue reading

Join Cloudflare India Forum in Bangalore on 6 June 2019!

Please join us for an exclusive gathering to discover the latest in cloud solutions for Internet Security and Performance.

Cloudflare Bangalore Meetup

Thursday, 6 June, 2019:  15:30 - 20:00

Location: the Oberoi (37-39, MG Road, Yellappa Garden, Yellappa Chetty Layout, Sivanchetti Gardens, Bengalore)

We will discuss the newest security trends and introduce serverless solutions.

We have invited renowned leaders across industries, including big brands and some of the fastest-growing startups. You will  learn the insider strategies and tactics that will help you to protect your business, to accelerate the performance and to identify the quick-wins in a complex internet environment.

Speakers:

• Vaidik Kapoor, Head of Engineering, Grofers
• Nithyanand Mehta, VP of Technical Services & GM India, Catchpoint
• Viraj Patel, VP of Technology, Bookmyshow
• Kailash Nadh, CTO, Zerodha
• Trey Guinn, Global Head of Solution Engineering, Cloudflare

Agenda:

15:30 - 16:00 - Registration and Refreshment

16:00 - 16:30 - DDoS Landscapes and Security Trends

16:30 - 17:15 - Workers Overview and Demo

17:15 - 18:00 - Panel Discussion - Best Practice on Successful Cyber Security and Performance Strategy

18:00 - 18:30 - Keynote #1 - Future edge computing

18:30 - 19:00 -  Keynote # 2 - Cyber attacks are evolving, Continue reading