Empowering Your Privacy

Happy Data Privacy Day! At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet, and we believe data privacy is core to that mission. But we know words are cheap — even data brokers who sell your personal information will tell you that “privacy is important” to them. So we wanted to take the opportunity on this Data Privacy Day to show you how our commitment to privacy crosses all levels of the work we do at Cloudflare to help make the Internet more private and secure — and therefore better — for everyone.

Privacy on the Internet means different things to different people. Maybe privacy means you get to control your personal data — who can collect it and how it can be used. Or that you have the right to access and delete your personal information. Or maybe it means your online life is protected from government surveillance or from ad trackers and targeted advertising. Maybe you think you should be able to be completely anonymous online. At Cloudflare, we think all these flavors of privacy are equally important, and as we describe in more detail below, we’ve taken steps to address each of these privacy priorities.

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JavaScript Libraries Are Almost Never Updated Once Installed

Cloudflare helps run CDNJS, a very popular way of including JavaScript and other frontend resources on web pages. With the CDNJS team’s permission we collect anonymized and aggregated data from CDNJS requests which we use to understand how people build on the Internet. Our analysis today is focused on one question: once installed on a site, do JavaScript libraries ever get updated?

Let’s consider jQuery, the most popular JavaScript library on Earth. This chart shows the number of requests made for a selected list of jQuery versions over the past 12 months:

Spikes in the CDNJS data as you see with version 3.3.1 are not uncommon as very large sites add and remove CDNJS script tags.

We see a steady rise of version 3.4.1 following its release on May 2nd, 2019. What we don’t see is a substantial decline of old versions. Version 3.2.1 shows an average popularity of 36M requests at the beginning of our sample, and 29M at the end, a decline of approximately 20%. This aligns with a corpus of research which shows the average website lasts somewhere between two and four years. What we don’t see is a decline Continue reading

Announcing the Cloudflare Access App Launch

Every person joining your team has the same question on Day One: how do I find and connect to the applications I need to do my job?

Since launch, Cloudflare Access has helped improve how users connect to those applications. When you protect an application with Access, users never have to connect to a private network and never have to deal with a clunky VPN client. Instead, they reach on-premise apps as if they were SaaS tools. Behind the scenes, Access evaluates and logs every request to those apps for identity, giving administrators more visibility and security than a traditional VPN.

Administrators need about an hour to deploy Access. End user logins take about 20 ms, and that response time is consistent globally. Unlike VPN appliances, Access runs in every data center in Cloudflare’s network in 200 cities around the world. When Access works well, it should be easy for administrators and invisible to the end user.

However, users still need to locate the applications behind Access, and for internally managed applications, traditional dashboards require constant upkeep. As organizations grow, that roster of links keeps expanding. Department leads and IT administrators can create and publish manual lists, but those become Continue reading

Introducing Cloudflare for Campaigns

During the past year, we saw nearly 2 billion global citizens go to the polls to vote in democratic elections. There were major elections in more than 50 countries, including India, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom, as well as elections for the European Parliament. In 2020, we will see a similar number of elections in countries from Peru to Myanmar. In November, U.S citizens will cast their votes for the 46th President, 435 seats in the U.S House of Representatives, 35 of the 100 seats in the U.S. Senate, and many state and local elections.

Recognizing the importance of maintaining public access to election information, Cloudflare launched the Athenian Project in 2017, providing U.S. state and local government entities with the tools needed to secure their election websites for free. As we’ve seen, however, political parties and candidates for office all over the world are also frequent targets for cyberattack. Cybersecurity needs for campaign websites and internal tools are at an all time high.

Although Cloudflare has helped improve the security and performance of political parties and candidates for office all over the world for years, we’ve long felt that we could do more. So today, Continue reading

A cost-effective and extensible testbed for transport protocol development

This was originally published on Perf Planet's 2019 Web Performance Calendar.

At Cloudflare, we develop protocols at multiple layers of the network stack. In the past, we focused on HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and TLS 1.3. Now, we are working on QUIC and HTTP/3, which are still in IETF draft, but gaining a lot of interest.

QUIC is a secure and multiplexed transport protocol that aims to perform better than TCP under some network conditions. It is specified in a family of documents: a transport layer which specifies packet format and basic state machine, recovery and congestion control, security based on TLS 1.3, and an HTTP application layer mapping, which is now called HTTP/3.

Let’s focus on the transport and recovery layer first. This layer provides a basis for what is sent on the wire (the packet binary format) and how we send it reliably. It includes how to open the connection, how to handshake a new secure session with the help of TLS, how to send data reliably and how to react when there is packet loss or reordering of packets. Also it includes flow control and congestion control to interact well with other transport protocols in Continue reading

Helping mitigate the Citrix NetScaler CVE with Cloudflare Access

Yesterday, Citrix sent an updated notification to customers warning of a vulnerability in their Application Delivery Controller (ADC) product. If exploited, malicious attackers can bypass the login page of the administrator portal, without authentication, to perform arbitrary code execution.

No patch is available yet. Citrix expects to have a fix for certain versions on January 20 and others at the end of the month.

In the interim, Citrix has asked customers to attempt to mitigate the vulnerability. The recommended steps involve running a number of commands from an administrator command line interface.

The vulnerability relied on by attackers requires that they first be able to reach a login portal hosted by the ADC. Cloudflare can help teams secure that page and the resources protected by the ADC. Teams can place the login page, as well as the administration interface, behind Cloudflare Access’ identity proxy to prevent unauthenticated users from making requests to the portal.

Exploiting URL paths

Citrix ADC, also known as Citrix NetScaler, is an application delivery controller that provides Layer 3 through Layer 7 security for applications and APIs. Once deployed, administrators manage the installation of the ADC through a portal available at a dedicated URL on Continue reading

Accelerating UDP packet transmission for QUIC

This was originally published on Perf Planet's 2019 Web Performance Calendar.

QUIC, the new Internet transport protocol designed to accelerate HTTP traffic, is delivered on top of UDP datagrams, to ease deployment and avoid interference from network appliances that drop packets from unknown protocols. This also allows QUIC implementations to live in user-space, so that, for example, browsers will be able to implement new protocol features and ship them to their users without having to wait for operating systems updates.

But while a lot of work has gone into optimizing TCP implementations as much as possible over the years, including building offloading capabilities in both software (like in operating systems) and hardware (like in network interfaces), UDP hasn't received quite as much attention as TCP, which puts QUIC at a disadvantage. In this post we'll look at a few tricks that help mitigate this disadvantage for UDP, and by association QUIC.

For the purpose of this blog post we will only be concentrating on measuring throughput of QUIC connections, which, while necessary, is not enough to paint an accurate overall picture of the performance of the QUIC protocol (or its implementations) as a whole.

Test Environment

The client used Continue reading

Prototyping optimizations with Cloudflare Workers and WebPageTest

This article was originally published as part of  Perf Planet's 2019 Web Performance Calendar.

Have you ever wanted to quickly test a new performance idea, or see if the latest performance wisdom is beneficial to your site? As web performance appears to be a stochastic process, it is really important to be able to iterate quickly and review the effects of different experiments. The challenge is to be able to arbitrarily change requests and responses without the overhead of setting up another internet facing server. This can be straightforward to implement by combining two of my favourite technologies : WebPageTest and Cloudflare Workers. Pat Meenan sums this up with the following slide from a recent getting the most of WebPageTest presentation:

So what is Cloudflare Workers and why is it ideally suited to easy prototyping of optimizations?

Cloudflare Workers

From the documentation :

Cloudflare Workers provides a lightweight JavaScript execution environment that allows developers to augment existing applications or create entirely new ones without configuring or maintaining infrastructure.A Cloudflare Worker is a programmable proxy which brings the simplicity and flexibility of the Service Workers event-based fetch API from the browser to the edge. This allows a worker to Continue reading

Introducing Cloudflare for Teams

Ten years ago, when Cloudflare was created, the Internet was a place that people visited. People still talked about ‘surfing the web’ and the iPhone was less than two years old, but on July 4, 2009 large scale DDoS attacks were launched against websites in the US and South Korea.

Those attacks highlighted how fragile the Internet was and how all of us were becoming dependent on access to the web as part of our daily lives.

Fast forward ten years and the speed, reliability and safety of the Internet is paramount as our private and work lives depend on it.

We started Cloudflare to solve one half of every IT organization's challenge: how do you ensure the resources and infrastructure that you expose to the Internet are safe from attack, fast, and reliable. We saw that the world was moving away from hardware and software to solve these problems and instead wanted a scalable service that would work around the world.

To deliver that, we built one of the world's largest networks. Today our network spans more than 200 cities worldwide and is within milliseconds of nearly everyone connected to the Internet. We have built the capacity to stand Continue reading

Security on the Internet with Cloudflare for Teams

Your experience using the Internet has continued to improve over time. It’s gotten faster, safer, and more reliable. However, you probably have to use a different, worse, equivalent of it when you do your work. While the Internet kept getting better, businesses and their employees were stuck using their own private networks.

In those networks, teams hosted their own applications, stored their own data, and protected all of it by building a castle and moat around that private world. This model hid internally managed resources behind VPN appliances and on-premise firewall hardware. The experience was awful, for users and administrators alike. While the rest of the Internet became more performant and more reliable, business users were stuck in an alternate universe.

That legacy approach was less secure and slower than teams wanted, but the corporate perimeter mostly worked for a time. However, that began to fall apart with the rise of cloud-delivered applications. Businesses migrated to SaaS versions of software that previously lived in that castle and behind that moat. Users needed to connect to the public Internet to do their jobs, and attackers made the Internet unsafe in sophisticated, unpredictable ways - which opened up every business to  a Continue reading

Cloudflare + Remote Browser Isolation

Cloudflare announced today that it has purchased S2 Systems Corporation, a Seattle-area startup that has built an innovative remote browser isolation solution unlike any other currently in the market. The majority of endpoint compromises involve web browsers — by putting space between users’ devices and where web code executes, browser isolation makes endpoints substantially more secure. In this blog post, I’ll discuss what browser isolation is, why it is important, how the S2 Systems cloud browser works, and how it fits with Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet.

What’s wrong with web browsing?

It’s been more than 30 years since Tim Berners-Lee wrote the project proposal defining the technology underlying what we now call the world wide web. What Berners-Lee envisioned as being useful for “several thousand people, many of them very creative, all working toward common goals”^[1] has grown to become a fundamental part of commerce, business, the global economy, and an integral part of society used by more than 58% of the world’s population^[2].

The world wide web and web browsers have unequivocally become the platform for much of the productive work (and play) people do every day. However, as the pervasiveness Continue reading

Cloudflare Expanded to 200 Cities in 2019

We have exciting news: Cloudflare closed out the decade by reaching our 200th city* across 90+ countries. Each new location increases the security, performance, and reliability of the 20-million-plus Internet properties on our network. Over the last quarter, we turned up seven data centers spanning from Chattogram, Bangladesh all the way to the Hawaiian Islands:

• Chattogram & Dhaka, Bangladesh. These data centers are our first in Bangladesh, ensuring that its 161 million residents will have a better experience on our network.
• Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. Honolulu is one of the most remote cities in the world; with our Honolulu data center up and running, Hawaiian visitors can be served 2,400 miles closer than ever before! Hawaii is a hub for many submarine cables in the Pacific, meaning that some Pacific Islands will also see significant improvements.
• Adelaide, Australia. Our 7th Australasian data center can be found “down under” in the capital of South Australia. Despite being Australia’s fifth-largest city, Adelaide is often overlooked for Australian interconnection. We, for one, are happy to establish a presence in it and its unique UTC+9:30 time zone!
• Thimphu, Bhutan. Bhutan is the seventh SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) country Continue reading

Adopting a new approach to HTTP prioritization

Friday the 13th is a lucky day for Cloudflare for many reasons. On December 13, 2019 Tommy Pauly, co-chair of the IETF HTTP Working Group, announced the adoption of the "Extensible Prioritization Scheme for HTTP" - a new approach to HTTP prioritization.

Web pages are made up of many resources that must be downloaded before they can be presented to the user. The role of HTTP prioritization is to load the right bytes at the right time in order to achieve the best performance. This is a collaborative process between client and server, a client sends priority signals that the server can use to schedule the delivery of response data. In HTTP/1.1 the signal is basic, clients order requests smartly across a pool of about 6 connections. In HTTP/2 a single connection is used and clients send a signal per request, as a frame, which describes the relative dependency and weighting of the response. HTTP/3 tried to use the same approach but dependencies don't work well when signals can be delivered out of order.

HTTP/3 is being standardised as part of the QUIC effort. As a Working Group (WG) we've been trying to fix the problems that non-deterministic ordering Continue reading

Happy Holidays!

I joined Cloudflare in July of 2019, but I've known of Cloudflare for years. I always read the blog posts and looked at the way the company was engaging with the community. I also noticed the diversity in the names of many of the blog post authors.

There are over 50 languages spoken at Cloudflare, as we have natives from many countries on our team, with different backgrounds, religions, gender and cultures. And it is this diversity that makes us a great team.

A few days ago I asked one of my colleagues how he would say "Happy Holidays!" in Arabic. When I heard him say it, I instantly got the idea of recording a video in as many languages as possible of our colleagues wishing all of you, our readers and customers, a happy winter season.

It only took one internal message for people to start responding and sending their videos to me. Some did it themselves, others flocked in a meeting room and helped each other record their greeting. It took a few days and some video editing to put together an informal video that was entirely done by the team, to wish you all the best Continue reading

Top 10 Money Moves of 2019 in SDxCentral’s World

This holiday’s biggest online shopping day was… Black Friday

What’s the biggest day of the holiday season for holiday shopping? Black Friday, the day after US Thanksgiving, has been embraced globally as the day retail stores announce their sales. But it was believed that the following Monday, dubbed “Cyber Monday,” may be even bigger. Or, with the explosion of reliable 2-day and even 1-day shipping, maybe another day closer to Christmas has taken the crown. At Cloudflare, we aimed to answer this question for the 2019 holiday shopping season.

Black Friday was the biggest online shopping day but the second biggest wasn't Cyber Monday... it was Thanksgiving Day itself (the day before Black Friday!). Cyber Monday was the fourth biggest day.

Here's a look at checkout events seen across Cloudflare's network since before Thanksgiving in the US.

The weekends are shown in yellow and Black Friday and Cyber Monday are shown in green. You can see that checkouts ramped up during Thanksgiving week and then continued through the weekend into Cyber Monday.

Black Friday had twice the number of checkouts as the preceding Friday and the entire Thanksgiving week dominates. Post-Cyber Monday, no day reached 50% of the Continue reading

First Half 2019 Transparency Report and an Update on a Warrant Canary

Today, we are releasing Cloudflare’s transparency report for the first half of 2019. We recognize the importance of keeping the reports current, but It’s taken us a little longer than usual to put it together. We have a few notable updates.

Pulling a warrant canary

Since we issued our very first transparency report in 2014, we’ve maintained a number of commitments - known as warrant canaries - about what actions we will take and how we will respond to certain types of law enforcement requests. We supplemented those initial commitments earlier this year, so that our current warrant canaries state that Cloudflare has never:

1. Turned over our encryption or authentication keys or our customers' encryption or authentication keys to anyone.
2. Installed any law enforcement software or equipment anywhere on our network.
3. Terminated a customer or taken down content due to political pressure*
4. Provided any law enforcement organization a feed of our customers' content transiting our network.
5. Modified customer content at the request of law enforcement or another third party.
6. Modified the intended destination of DNS responses at the request of law enforcement or another third party.
7. Weakened, compromised, or subverted any of its encryption at the request of law Continue reading

An Update on CDNJS

When you loaded this blog, a file was delivered to your browser called jquery-3.2.1.min.js. jQuery is a library which makes it easier to build websites, and was at one point included on as many as 74.1% of all websites. A full eighteen million sites include jQuery and other libraries using one of the most popular tools on Earth: CDNJS. Beginning about a month ago Cloudflare began to take a more active role in the operation of CDNJS. This post is here to tell you more about CDNJS’ history and explain why we are helping to manage CDNJS.

What CDNJS Does

Virtually every site is composed of not just the code written by its developers, but also dozens or hundreds of libraries. These libraries make it possible for websites to extend what a web browser can do on its own. For example, libraries can allow a site to include powerful data visualizations, respond to user input, or even get more performant.

These libraries created wondrous and magical new capabilities for web browsers, but they can also cause the size of a site to explode. Particularly a decade ago, connections were not always fast enough Continue reading

Announcing the CSAM Scanning Tool, Free for All Cloudflare Customers

Two weeks ago we wrote about Cloudflare's approach to dealing with child sexual abuse material (CSAM). We first began working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), the US-based organization that acts as a clearinghouse for removing this abhorrent content, within months of our public launch in 2010. Over the last nine years, our Trust & Safety team has worked with NCMEC, Interpol, and nearly 60 other public and private agencies around the world to design our program. And we are proud of the work we've done to remove CSAM from the Internet.

The most repugnant cases, in some ways, are the easiest for us to address. While Cloudflare is not able to remove content hosted by others, we will take steps to terminate services to a website when it becomes clear that the site is dedicated to sharing CSAM or if the operators of the website and its host fail to take appropriate steps to take down CSAM content. When we terminate websites, we purge our caches — something that takes effect within seconds globally — and we block the website from ever being able to use Cloudflare's network again.

Addressing the Hard Cases

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How we used our new GraphQL Analytics API to build Firewall Analytics

Firewall Analytics is the first product in the Cloudflare dashboard to utilize the new GraphQL Analytics API. All Cloudflare dashboard products are built using the same public APIs that we provide to our customers, allowing us to understand the challenges they face when interfacing with our APIs. This parity helps us build and shape our products, most recently the new GraphQL Analytics API that we’re thrilled to release today.

By defining the data we want, along with the response format, our GraphQL Analytics API has enabled us to prototype new functionality and iterate quickly from our beta user feedback. It is helping us deliver more insightful analytics tools within the Cloudflare dashboard to our customers.

Our user research and testing for Firewall Analytics surfaced common use cases in our customers' workflow:

• Identifying spikes in firewall activity over time
• Understanding the common attributes of threats
• Drilling down into granular details of an individual event to identify potential false positives

We can address all of these use cases using our new GraphQL Analytics API.

GraphQL Basics

Before we look into how to address each of these use cases, let's take a look at the format of a GraphQL query and how our Continue reading