Archive

Category Archives for "Networking"

D2DO295: Risks and Benefits of Putting AI in Production

Engineers and developers are using AI like never before, including in production. That has potential consequences, both good and bad, for uptime, operations, security and risk management, and more. Today’s guest, Rich Mogull, guides us through the decision-making process of adding AI to your production lifecycle and possible ramifications. Rich is Chief Analyst at the... Read more »

Always-on detections: eliminating the WAF “log versus block” trade-off

Traditional Web Application Firewalls typically require extensive, manual tuning of their rules before they can safely block malicious traffic. When a new application is deployed, security teams usually begin in a logging-only mode, sifting through logs to gradually assess which rules are safe for blocking mode. This process is designed to minimize false positives without affecting legitimate traffic. It’s manual, slow and error-prone.

Teams are forced into a trade-off: visibility in log mode, or protection in block mode. When a rule blocks a request, evaluation stops, and you lose visibility into how other signatures would have assessed it — valuable insight that could have helped you tune and strengthen your defenses.

Today, we’re solving this by introducing the next evolution of our managed rules: Attack Signature Detection.

When enabled, this detection inspects every request for malicious payloads and attaches rich detection metadata before any action is taken. You get complete visibility into every signature match, without sacrificing protection or performance. Onboarding becomes simple: traffic is analyzed, data accumulates, and you see exactly which signatures fire and why. You can then build precise mitigation policies based on past traffic, reducing the risk of false positives.

But we’re going one step further. Continue reading

Mind the gap: new tools for continuous enforcement from boot to login

One of our favorite ask-me-anything questions for company meetings or panels at security conferences is the classic: “What keeps you up at night?”

For a CISO, that question is maybe a bit of a nightmare in itself. It does not have one single answer; it has dozens. It’s the constant tension between enabling a globally distributed workforce to do their best work, and ensuring that "best work" does not inadvertently open the door to a catastrophic breach.

We often talk about the "zero trust journey," but the reality is that the journey is almost certainly paved with friction. If security is too cumbersome, users find creative (and dangerous) ways around it. If it’s seamless at the cost of effectiveness, it might not be secure enough to stop a determined adversary.

Today, we are excited to announce two new tools in Cloudflare’s SASE toolbox designed to modernize remote access by eliminating the "dark corners" of your network security without adding friction to the user experience: mandatory authentication and Cloudflare’s own multi-factor authentication (MFA). 

Addressing the gap between installation and enforcement

When you deploy the Cloudflare One Client, you gain incredible visibility and control. You can apply Continue reading

The Tale of Two EVPN/MPLS Encapsulations

I decided it was high time to create EVPN/MPLS netlab integration tests and wanted to use the same approach I used for the EVPN/VXLAN ones:

  • One of the PE-devices is the device we want to test
  • The other PE-device is a device that is known to work (ideally, an FRRouting container).
  • Bonus points if the other PE-device can generate operational data in JSON format. Using a device for which we already have a validation plugin is close to perfection.
  • Add a P-router in the middle because MPLS.
  • Attach some hosts to the two PE-devices (we’re testing two MAC-VRFs in the final version of the test)
  • After validating everything that can reasonably be validated (OSPF session, IBGP session, EVPN AF on IBGP session), do the end-to-end pings and hope for the best.

This is the graph netlab created from the lab topology:

Read more …

Stop reacting to breaches and start preventing them with User Risk Scoring

Most security teams spend their days playing a high-stakes game of Whac-A-Mole. A user’s credentials get phished, or they accidentally download a malicious file, and suddenly you’re in incident response mode. 

We built our SASE platform, Cloudflare One, to stop that cycle. By placing Access and Gateway in front of your applications and Internet traffic, we gave you the tools to decide who gets in and where they can go.

Today, we’re making those decisions smarter. You can now incorporate User Risk Scores directly into your zero trust network access (ZTNA) policies. Instead of just checking "Who is this user?" and "Is their device healthy?", you can now ask, "How has this user been behaving lately?" and adjust their access in real time.

Step 1: From "what" to "how"

For years, traditional corporate access was binary. You either had the right login and the right certificate, or you didn’t. But identity is fluid. A legitimate user can become a risk if their account is compromised or if they start exhibiting "insider threat" behaviors — like impossible travel, multiple failed login attempts, or triggering data loss prevention rules by moving sensitive data.

Cloudflare One now Continue reading

Moving from license plates to badges: the Gateway Authorization Proxy

We often talk about the "ideal" state, one where every device has a managed client like the Cloudflare One Client installed, providing deep visibility and seamless protection. However, reality often gets in the way.

Sometimes you are dealing with a company acquisition, managing virtual desktops, or working in a highly regulated environment where you simply cannot install software on an endpoint. You still need to protect that traffic, even when you don’t fully manage the device.

Closing this gap requires moving the identity challenge from the device to the network itself. By combining the browser’s native proxy capabilities with our global network, we can verify users and enforce granular policies on any device that can reach the Internet. We’ve built the Gateway Authorization Proxy and Proxy Auto-Configuration (PAC) File Hosting to automate this authentication and simplify how unmanaged devices connect to Cloudflare.

The problem: sometimes IP addresses aren't enough

Back in 2022, we released proxy endpoints that allowed you to route traffic through Cloudflare to apply filtering rules. It solved the immediate need for access, but it had a significant "identity crisis."

Because that system relied on static IP addresses to identify users, it was a bit like a Continue reading

Defeating the deepfake: stopping laptop farms and insider threats

Trust is the most expensive vulnerability in modern security architecture. In recent years, the security industry has pivoted toward a zero trust model for networks — assuming breach and verifying every request. Yet when it comes to the people behind those requests, we often default back to implicit trust. We trust that the person on the Zoom call is who they say they are. We trust that the documents uploaded to an HR portal are genuine.

That trust is now being weaponized at an unprecedented scale.

In our 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report, we highlight a rapidly accelerating threat vector: the rise of "remote IT worker" fraud. Often linked to nation-states, including North Korea, these are not just individual bad actors. They are organized operations running laptop farms: warehouses of devices remotely accessed by workers using stolen identities to infiltrate companies, steal intellectual property (IP), and funnel revenue illicitly.

These attackers have evolved and continue to do so with advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). They use generative AI to pass interviews and deepfake tools to fabricate flawless government IDs. Traditional background checks and standard identity providers (IdPs) are no longer enough. Bad actors are exploiting an identity assurance gap, Continue reading

Introducing the 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report

Today’s threat landscape is more varied and chilling than ever: Sophisticated nation-state actors. Hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks. Deepfakes and fraudsters interviewing at your company. Even stealth attacks via trusted internal tools like Google Calendar, Dropbox, and GitHub.

After spending the last year translating trillions of network signals into actionable intelligence, Cloudforce One has identified a fundamental evolution in the threat landscape: the era of brute force entry is fading. In its place is a model of high-trust exploitation that prioritizes results at all costs. In order to equip defenders with a strategic roadmap for this new era, today we are releasing the inaugural 2026 Cloudflare Threat Report. This report provides the intelligence organizations need to navigate the rise of industrialized cyber threats.

The new barometer for risk: Measure of Effectiveness (MOE)

Cloudforce One has observed a broader shift in attacker psychology. To understand how these methods win, we have to look at the why behind them: the Measure of Effectiveness, or MOE.

In 2026, the modern adversary is trading the pursuit of "sophistication" (complex, expensive, one-off hacks) in favor of throughput. MOE is the metric attackers use to decide what to exploit next. It is a cold calculation of the Continue reading

Evolving Cloudflare’s Threat Intelligence Platform: actionable, scalable, and ETL-less

For years, the cybersecurity industry has suffered from a "data gravity" problem. Security teams are buried under billions of rows of telemetry, yet they remain starved for actionable insights. 

A Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) is a centralized security system that collects, aggregates, and organizes data about known and emerging cyber threats. It serves as the vital connective tissue between raw telemetry and active defense.

The underlying architecture of Cloudflare’s Threat Intelligence Platform sets it apart from other solutions. We have evolved our Threat Intelligence Platform to eliminate the need for complex ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines by using a sharded, SQLite-backed architecture. By running GraphQL directly on the edge, security teams can now visualize and automate threat response in real time. Instead of one massive database, we distribute Threat Events across thousands of logical shards — meaning sub-second query latency, even when aggregating millions of events across global datasets.

By unifying our global telemetry with the manual investigations performed by our analysts, our intelligence platform creates a single source of truth that allows security teams to move from observing a threat to preemptively blocking it across the Cloudflare network. We believe your intelligence platform shouldn't just tell you that Continue reading

Worth Reading: Faster than Dijkstra?

Bruce Davie published a nice article explaining why it makes little sense to use an algorithm that’s supposedly faster than Dijkstra’s in link-state routing protocols.

Other interesting data points from the article (and linked presentations):

  • People are running (a few) thousands of routers in a single area
  • Running Dijkstra’s algorithm on an emulated network with 2000 nodes took 100 msec… in 2003 (page 18 of this NANOG presentation).

It turns out (as I expected) that all the noise about the need for new routing protocols we were experiencing a few years ago was either due to bad implementations or coming from nerds looking for new toys to play with.

See risk, fix risk: introducing Remediation in Cloudflare CASB

Starting today, Cloudflare CASB customers can do more than see risky file-sharing across their SaaS apps: they can fix it, directly from the Cloudflare One dashboard.

This launch marks a huge advancement for Cloudflare’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). Since its release, Cloudflare’s API-based CASB has focused on providing robust, comprehensive visibility and detection. It also connects to the SaaS tools your business runs on, surfacing misconfigurations, and flagging overshared data before it becomes tomorrow’s incident.

With today’s release of Remediation – a new way to fix problems with just a click, right from the CASB Findings page – CASB begins its next chapter, and moves from telling you what’s wrong to helping you make it right.

An example of a Remediation Action (Remove Public File Sharing) in a CASB Finding.

CASB 101: A single place to see SaaS risk

Inside Cloudflare One, our SASE platform, CASB connects to the SaaS and cloud tools your teams already use. By talking to providers over API, CASB gives security and IT teams:

  • A consolidated view of misconfigurations, overshared files, and risky access patterns across apps like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, Box, GitHub, Jira, and Confluence (CASB Integrations).

  • Continue reading

From reactive to proactive: closing the phishing gap with LLMs

Email security has always been defined by impermanence. It is a perpetual call-and-response arms race, where defenses are only as strong as the last bypass discovered and attackers iterate relentlessly for even marginal gains. Every control we deploy eventually becomes yesterday’s solution.

What makes this challenge especially difficult is that our biggest weaknesses are, by definition, invisible.

This problem is best illustrated by a classic example from World War II. Mathematician Abraham Wald was tasked with helping Allied engineers decide where to reinforce bomber aircraft. Engineers initially focused on the bullet holes visible on planes returning from missions. Wald pointed out the flaw: they were reinforcing the areas where planes could already take damage and survive. The true vulnerabilities were on the planes that never came back.

Email security faces an identical hurdle: our detection gaps are unseen. By integrating LLMs, we advance email phishing protection and move from reactive to proactive detection improvement.

The limits of reactive defense

Traditional email security systems improve primarily through user-reported misses. For example, if we marked a spam message as clean, customers can send us the original EML to our pipelines for our analysts to analyze and update our models. This feedback loop Continue reading

How Cloudy translates complex security into human action

Today’s security ecosystem generates a staggering amount of complex telemetry. For instance, processing a single email requires analyzing sender reputation, authentication results, link behavior, infrastructure metadata, and countless other attributes. Simultaneously, Cloud access security broker (CASB) engines continuously scan SaaS environments for signals that detect misconfigurations, risky access, and exposed data.

But while detections have become more sophisticated, explanations have not always kept pace.

Security and IT teams are often aware when something is flagged, but they do not always know, at a glance, why. End users are asked to make real-time decisions about emails that may impact the entire organization, yet they are rarely given clear, contextual guidance in the moment that matters.

Cloudy changes that.

Cloudy is our LLM-powered explanation layer, built directly into Cloudflare One. It translates complex machine learning outputs into precise, human-readable guidance for security teams and end users alike. Instead of exposing raw technical signals, Cloudy surfaces the reasoning behind a detection in a way that drives informed action.

For Cloudflare Email Security, this means helping users understand why a message was flagged before they escalate it to the security operations center, or SOC. For Cloudflare CASB, it means helping administrators quickly understand Continue reading

Packet trimming Deep Dive – Part IV

Receive Network Processing Unit (Rx NPU)

Figure 9-4 illustrates a simplified receive-side processing pipeline, starting from the moment a Packet Header Vector (PHV), constructed by the Rx IFG, is delivered to the Receive Network Processing Unit (Rx NPU).

When the PHV arrives at the Rx NPU, it is dispatched to one of the Run-to-Completion (RTC) cores in the Packet Processing Array (PPA). Each RTC core processes the packet within a single execution context, allowing parsing, classification, lookup, and queuing decisions to be resolved without intermediate handoffs between processing stages.

The first task of the RTC parser is to perform deep inspection of the packet headers. While the Rx IFG has already extracted basic Layer-2 and Layer-3 information, the RTC parser determines whether the packet is tunneled and whether the switch itself is the tunnel termination point. To demonstrate this behavior, consider a VXLAN-encapsulated packet. The outer Ethernet and IP headers are used to forward the packet through the underlay network. If the outer destination IP address matches one of the local switch IP addresses, the device identifies itself as the tunnel endpoint. The tunneling protocol is recognized by examining the UDP header, where destination port 4789 indicates VXLAN. After the Continue reading

1 2 3 4 5 … 3,492