Birthday Week recap: everything we announced — plus an AI-powered opportunity for startups

This year, Cloudflare officially became a teenager, turning 13 years old. We celebrated this milestone with a series of announcements that benefit both our customers and the Internet community.

From developing applications in the age of AI to securing against the most advanced attacks that are yet to come, Cloudflare is proud to provide the tools that help our customers stay one step ahead.

We hope you’ve had a great time following along and for anyone looking for a recap of everything we launched this week, here it is:

Monday

BGP Session Security: Be Very Skeptical

A while ago I explained how Generalized TTL Security Mechanism could be used to prevent denial-of-service attacks on routers running EBGP. Considering the results published in Analyzing the Security of BGP Message Parsing presentation from DEFCON 31 I started wondering how well GTSM implementations work.

TL&DR summary:

WPA2 Cracking On NVIDIA with CUDA

In the previous tutorial "Cracking WPA/WPA2 Pre-shared Key Using GPU", we showed how to crack […]

The post WPA2 Cracking On NVIDIA with CUDA first appeared on Brezular's Blog.

Cloudflare now uses post-quantum cryptography to talk to your origin server

Quantum computers pose a serious threat to security and privacy of the Internet: encrypted communication intercepted today can be decrypted in the future by a sufficiently advanced quantum computer. To counter this store-now/decrypt-later threat, cryptographers have been hard at work over the last decades proposing and vetting post-quantum cryptography (PQC), cryptography that’s designed to withstand attacks of quantum computers. After a six-year public competition, in July 2022, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), known for standardizing AES and SHA, announced Kyber as their pick for post-quantum key agreement. Now the baton has been handed to Industry to deploy post-quantum key agreement to protect today’s communications from the threat of future decryption by a quantum computer.

Cloudflare operates as a reverse proxy between clients (“visitors”) and customers’ web servers (“origins”), so that we can protect origin sites from attacks and improve site performance. In this post we explain how we secure the connection from Cloudflare to origin servers. To put that in context, let’s have a look at the connection involved when visiting an uncached page on a website served through Cloudflare.

The first connection is from the visitor’s browser to Cloudflare. In October 2022, we enabled X25519+Kyber Continue reading

Detecting zero-days before zero-day

We are constantly researching ways to improve our products. For the Web Application Firewall (WAF), the goal is simple: keep customer web applications safe by building the best solution available on the market.

In this blog post we talk about our approach and ongoing research into detecting novel web attack vectors in our WAF before they are seen by a security researcher. If you are interested in learning about our secret sauce, read on.

This post is the written form of a presentation first delivered at Black Hat USA 2023.

The value of a WAF

Many companies offer web application firewalls and application security products with a total addressable market forecasted to increase for the foreseeable future.

In this space, vendors, including ourselves, often like to boast the importance of their solution by presenting ever-growing statistics around threats to web applications. Bigger numbers and scarier stats are great ways to justify expensive investments in web security. Taking a few examples from our very own application security report research (see our latest report here):

The numbers above all translate to real value: yes, a large portion of Internet HTTP traffic is malicious, therefore you could mitigate a non-negligible amount Continue reading

Cloudflare is free of CAPTCHAs; Turnstile is free for everyone

For years, we’ve written that CAPTCHAs drive us crazy. Humans give up on CAPTCHA puzzles approximately 15% of the time and, maddeningly, CAPTCHAs are significantly easier for bots to solve than they are for humans. We’ve spent the past three and a half years working to build a better experience for humans that’s just as effective at stopping bots. As of this month, we’ve finished replacing every CAPTCHA issued by Cloudflare with Turnstile, our new CAPTCHA replacement (pictured below). Cloudflare will never issue another visual puzzle to anyone, for any reason.

Now that we’ve eliminated CAPTCHAs at Cloudflare, we want to make it easy for anyone to do the same, even if they don’t use other Cloudflare services. We’ve decoupled Turnstile from our platform so that any website operator on any platform can use it just by adding a few lines of code. We’re thrilled to announce that Turnstile is now generally available, and Turnstile’s ‘Managed’ mode is now completely free to everyone for unlimited use.

Easy on humans, hard on bots, private for everyone

There’s a lot that goes into Turnstile’s simple checkbox to ensure that it’s easy for everyone, preserves user privacy, and does its job stopping bots. Continue reading

The Essence of Cisco and Splunk

You no doubt noticed that Cisco bought Splunk last week for $28 billion. It was a deal that had been rumored for at least a year if not longer. The purchase makes a lot of sense from a number of angles. I’m going to focus on a couple of them here with some alliteration to help you understand why this may be one of the biggest signals of a shift in the way that Cisco does business.

The S Stands for Security

Cisco is now a premier security company now. The addition of the most power SIEM on the market means that Cisco’s security strategy now has a completeness of vision. SecureX has been a very big part of the sales cycle for Cisco as of late and having all the parts to make it work top to bottom is a big win. XDR is a great thing for organizations but it doesn’t work without massive amounts of data to analyze. Guess where Splunk comes in?

Aside from some very specialized plays, Cisco now has an answer for just about everything a modern enterprise could want in a security vendor. They may not be number one in every market but Continue reading

Cloudflare account permissions, how to use them, and best practices

In the dynamic landscape of modern web applications and organizations, access control is critical. Defining who can do what within your Cloudflare account ensures security and efficient workflow management. In order to help meet your organizational needs, whether you are a single developer, a small team, or a larger enterprise, we’re going to cover two changes that we have developed to make it easier to do user management, and best practices on how to use these features, alongside existing features in order to scope everything appropriately into your account, in order to ensure security while you are working with others.

What are roles?

In the preceding year, Cloudflare has expanded our list of roles available to everyone from 1 to over 60, and we are continuing to build out more, better roles. We have also made domain scoping a capability for all users. This prompts the question, what are roles, and why do they exist?

Roles are a set of permissions that exist in a bundle with a name. Every API call that is made to Cloudflare has a required set of permissions, otherwise an API call will return with a 403. We generally group permissions into a role to Continue reading

Making Content Security Policies (CSPs) easy with Page Shield

Modern web applications are complex, often loading JavaScript libraries from tens of different sources and submitting data to just as many. This leads to a vast attack surface area and many attack types that hackers may leverage to target the user browser directly. Magecart, a category of supply chain attack, is a good example.

To combat this, browser vendors (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, etc.) have agreed on a standard that allows application owners to control browser behavior from a security perspective. This standard is called Content Security Policies (CSPs). Content Security Policies are implemented by application owners as a specially formatted HTTP response header that the browser then parses and enforces. This header can be used, for example, to enforce loading of JavaScript libraries only from a specific set of URLs. CSPs are good as they reduce the attack surface, but are hard to implement and manage, especially in a fast-paced development environment.

Starting today, Page Shield, our client-side security product, supports all major CSP directives. We’ve also added better reporting, automated suggestions, and Page Shield specific user roles, making CSPs much easier to manage.

If you are a Page Shield enterprise customer, log in to your Continue reading

Random Thoughts on Zero-Trust Architecture

When preparing the materials for the Design Clinic section describing Zero-Trust Network Architecture, I wondered whether I was missing something crucial. After all, I couldn’t find anything new when reading the NIST documents – we’ve seen all they’re describing 30 years ago (remember Kerberos?).

In late August I dropped by the fantastic Roundtable and Barbecue event organized by Gabi Gerber (running Security Interest Group Switzerland) and used the opportunity to join the Zero Trust Architecture roundtable. Most other participants were seasoned IT security professionals with a level of skepticism approaching mine. When I mentioned I failed to see anything new in the now-overhyped topic, they quickly expressed similar doubts.

SEC To CEOs: Report Your Breaches

The SEC now requires publicly traded companies to report "material" security incidents. But what does "material" mean and how might this new requirement affect infosec practices at these companies?

The post SEC To CEOs: Report Your Breaches appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Application Security Report: Q2 2023

Cloudflare has a unique vantage point on the Internet. From this position, we are able to see, explore, and identify trends that would otherwise go unnoticed. In this report we are doing just that and sharing our insights into Internet-wide application security trends.

This report is the third edition of our Application Security Report. The first one was published in March 2022, with the second published earlier this year in March, and this is the first to be published on a  quarterly basis.

Since the last report, our network is bigger and faster: we are now processing an average of 46 million HTTP requests/second and 63 million at peak. We consistently handle approximately 25 million DNS queries per second. That's around 2.1 trillion DNS queries per day, and 65 trillion queries a month. This is the sum of authoritative and resolver requests served by our infrastructure. Summing up both HTTP and DNS requests, we get to see a lot of malicious traffic. Focusing on HTTP requests only, in Q2 2023 Cloudflare blocked an average of 112 billion cyber threats each day, and this is the data that powers this report.

But as usual, before we dive in, Continue reading

An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape

In 2023, cybersecurity continues to be in most cases a need-to-have for those who don’t want to take chances on getting caught in a cyberattack and its consequences. Attacks have gotten more sophisticated, while conflicts (online and offline, and at the same time) continue, including in Ukraine. Governments have heightened their cyber warnings and put together strategies, including around critical infrastructure (including health and education). All of this, at a time when there were never so many online risks, but also people online — over five billion in July 2023, 64.5% of the now eight billion that are the world’s total population.

Here we take a look at what we’ve been discussing in 2023, so far, in our Cloudflare blog related to attacks and online security in general, with several August reading list suggestions. From new trends, products, initiatives or partnerships, including AI service safety, to record-breaking blocked cyberattacks. On that note, our AI hub (ai.cloudflare.com) was just launched.

Throughout the year, Cloudflare has continued to onboard customers while they were being attacked, and we have provided protection to many others, including once.net, responsible for the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest online voting system Continue reading

Endace Debuts Packet Capture Software For Public Clouds

Endace has announced a new offering that can capture packets inside your public cloud deployments. Called EndaceProbe Cloud, the offering is available for AWS and Azure public clouds. It can also be deployed in VMware-based private clouds. Why capture packets in the cloud? Endace says the top two customer drivers are security and performance monitoring. […]

The post Endace Debuts Packet Capture Software For Public Clouds appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Introducing per hostname TLS settings — security fit to your needs

One of the goals of Cloudflare is to give our customers the necessary knobs to enable security in a way that fits their needs. In the realm of SSL/TLS, we offer two key controls: setting the minimum TLS version, and restricting the list of supported cipher suites. Previously, these settings applied to the entire domain, resulting in an “all or nothing” effect. While having uniform settings across the entire domain is ideal for some users, it sometimes lacks the necessary granularity for those with diverse requirements across their subdomains.

It is for that reason that we’re excited to announce that as of today, customers will be able to set their TLS settings on a per-hostname basis.

The trade-off with using modern protocols

In an ideal world, every domain could be updated to use the most secure and modern protocols without any setbacks. Unfortunately, that's not the case. New standards and protocols require adoption in order to be effective. TLS 1.3 was standardized by the IETF in April 2018. It removed the vulnerable cryptographic algorithms that TLS 1.2 supported and provided a performance boost by requiring only one roundtrip, as opposed to two. For a user to benefit from Continue reading

Unmasking the top exploited vulnerabilities of 2022

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) just released a report highlighting the most commonly exploited vulnerabilities of 2022. With our role as a reverse proxy to a large portion of the Internet, Cloudflare is in a unique position to observe how the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) mentioned by CISA are being exploited on the Internet.

We wanted to share a bit of what we’ve learned.

Based on our analysis, two CVEs mentioned in the CISA report are responsible for the vast majority of attack traffic seen in the wild: Log4J and Atlassian Confluence Code Injection. Although CISA/CSA discuss a larger number of vulnerabilities in the same report, our data clearly suggests a major difference in exploit volume between the top two and the rest of the list.

The top CVEs for 2022

Looking at the volume of requests detected by WAF Managed Rules that were created for the specific CVEs listed in the CISA report, we rank the vulnerabilities in order of prevalence:

How Cloudflare is staying ahead of the AMD Zen vulnerability known as “Zenbleed”

Google Project Zero revealed a new flaw in AMD's Zen 2 processors in a blog post today. The 'Zenbleed' flaw affects the entire Zen 2 product stack, from AMD's EPYC data center processors to the Ryzen 3000 CPUs, and can be exploited to steal sensitive data stored in the CPU, including encryption keys and login credentials. The attack can even be carried out remotely through JavaScript on a website, meaning that the attacker need not have physical access to the computer or server.

Cloudflare’s network includes servers using AMD’s Zen line of CPUs. We have patched our entire fleet of potentially impacted servers with AMD’s microcode to mitigate this potential vulnerability. While our network is now protected from this vulnerability, we will continue to monitor for any signs of attempted exploitation of the vulnerability and will report on any attempts we discover in the wild. To better understand the Zenbleed vulnerability, read on.

Background

Understanding how a CPU executes programs is crucial to comprehending the attack's workings. The CPU works with an arithmetic processing unit called the ALU. The ALU is used to perform mathematical tasks. Operations like addition, multiplication, and floating-point calculations fall under this category. The CPU's clock Continue reading

Don’t Let the Cybersecurity Trust Mark Become Like Food Labeling

I got several press releases this week talking about the newest program from the US Federal government for cybersecurity labeling. This program is something designed to help consumers understand how secure IoT devices are and the challenges that can be faced trying to keep your network secure from the large number of smart devices that are being implemented today. Consumer Reports has been pushing for something like this for a while and lauded the move with some caution. I’m going to take it a little further. We need to be very careful about this so it doesn’t become as worthless as the nutrition labels mandated by the government.

Absolute Units

Having labels is certainly better than not having them. Knowing how much sugar a sports drink has is way more helpful than when I was growing up and we had to guess. Knowing where to find that info on a package means I’m not having to go find it somewhere on the Internet¹. However, all is not sunshine and roses. That’s because of the way that companies choose to fudge their numbers.

Food companies spent a lot of time trying to work the numbers on those nutrition labels for Continue reading

Bring your own CA for client certificate validation with API Shield

APIs account for more than half of the total traffic of the Internet. They are the building blocks of many modern web applications. As API usage grows, so does the number of API attacks. And so now, more than ever, it’s important to keep these API endpoints secure. Cloudflare’s API Shield solution offers a comprehensive suite of products to safeguard your API endpoints and now we’re excited to give our customers one more tool to keep their endpoints safe. We’re excited to announce that customers can now bring their own Certificate Authority (CA) to use for mutual TLS client authentication. This gives customers more security, while allowing them to maintain control around their Mutual TLS configuration.

The power of Mutual TLS (mTLS)

Traditionally, when we refer to TLS certificates, we talk about the publicly trusted certificates that are presented by servers to prove their identity to the connecting client. With Mutual TLS, both the client and the server present a certificate to establish a two-way channel of trust. Doing this allows the server to check who the connecting client is and whether or not they’re allowed to make a request. The certificate presented by the client - the client certificate Continue reading

Cross Training for Career Completeness

Are you good at your job? Have you spent thousands of hours training to be the best at a particular discipline? Can you configure things with your eyes closed and are finally on top of the world? What happens next? Where do you go if things change?

It sounds like an age-old career question. You’ve mastered a role. You’ve learned all there is to learn. What more can you do? It’s not something specific to technology either. One of my favorite stories about this struggle comes from the iconic martial artist Bruce Lee. He spent his formative years becoming an expert at Wing Chun and no one would argue he wasn’t one of the best. As the story goes, in 1967 he engaged in a sparring match with a practitioner of a different art and, although he won, he was exhausted and thought things had gone on far too long. This is what encouraged him to develop Jeet Kun Do as a way to incorporate new styles together for more efficiency and eventually led to the development of mixed martial arts (MMA).

What does Bruce Lee have to do with tech? The value of cross training with different tech disciplines Continue reading