The Cloudflare Bug Bounty program and Cloudflare Pages

The Cloudflare Pages team recently collaborated closely with security researchers at Assetnote through our Public Bug Bounty. Throughout the process we found and have fully patched vulnerabilities discovered in Cloudflare Pages. You can read their detailed write-up here. There is no outstanding risk to Pages customers. In this post we share information about the research that could help others make their infrastructure more secure, and also highlight our bug bounty program that helps to make our product more secure.

Cloudflare cares deeply about security and protecting our users and customers — in fact, it’s a big part of the reason we’re here. But how does this manifest in terms of how we run our business? There are a number of ways. One very important prong of this is our bug bounty program that facilitates and rewards security researchers for their collaboration with us.

But we don’t just fix the security issues we learn about — in order to build trust with our customers and the community more broadly, we are transparent about incidents and bugs that we find.

Recently, we worked with a group of researchers on improving the security of Cloudflare Pages. This collaboration resulted in several security vulnerability Continue reading

Video: Practical Aspects of IPv6 Security

Christopher Werny has tons of hands-on experience with IPv6 security (or lack thereof), and described some of his findings in the Practical Aspects of IPv6 Security part of IPv6 security webinar, including:

• Impact of dual-stack networks
• Security implications of IPv6 address planning
• Isolation on routing layer and strict filtering
• IPv6-related requirements for Internet- or MPLS uplinks

Video: Practical Aspects of IPv6 Security

Christopher Werny has tons of hands-on experience with IPv6 security (or lack thereof), and described some of his findings in the Practical Aspects of IPv6 Security part of IPv6 security webinar, including:

• Impact of dual-stack networks
• Security implications of IPv6 address planning
• Isolation on routing layer and strict filtering
• IPv6-related requirements for Internet- or MPLS uplinks

What Is Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)?

In the first article in this series, we discussed what zero trust security is and why it matters. In this article, we will take a deep dive into zero trust network access, how it works, and its benefits to the modern organization.   What Is Zero Trust Network Access? Zero Trust Network Access, or ZTNA, is a security solution that many IT departments and IT organizations use to ensure secure remote access to a range of data, applications, networks, and services within an organization. ZTNA is based on defined access control policies that clearly communicate who has access to what and for how long that access is granted. ZTNA is a gap-filler when it comes to secure remote access tools, methods, and technologies. VPNs or virtual private networks are different from zero trust network access because VPNs give access to an entire network rather than specific applications or data. As the remote workforce continues to take shape and many companies lean on it as a source of employee satisfaction and employer productivity. Zero trust network access is pertinent to keeping the right people in and the wrong people out of your organization’s systems. How Does Zero Trust Network Access Work Continue reading

Privacy And Networking Part 3: Is An IP Address Protected Information For Privacy?

Does an IP address need to be treated like other Personally Indentifiable Information (PII)?

The post Privacy And Networking Part 3: Is An IP Address Protected Information For Privacy? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Secret Management with HashiCorp Vault

Many applications these days require authentication to external systems with resources, such as users and passwords to access databases and service accounts to access cloud services, and so on. In such cases, private information, like passwords and keys, becomes necessary. It is essential to take extra care in managing such sensitive data. For example, if you write your AWS key information or password in a script for deployment and then push it to a Git repository, all users who can read it will also be able to access it, and you could be in trouble. Even if it's an internal repository, you run the risk of a potential leak.

How we were managing secrets in the service

Before we talk about Vault, let's take a look at how we've used to manage secrets.

Salt

We use SaltStack as a bare-metal configuration management tool. The core of the Salt ecosystem consists of two major components: the Salt Master and the Salt Minion. The configuration state is owned by Salt Master, and thousands of Salt Minions automatically install packages, generate configuration files, and start services to the node based on the state. The state may contain secrets, such as passwords and API Continue reading

Protecting The Hybrid Workforce With Palo Alto Networks Secure, Flexible SASE Solution

Palo Alto Networks announces new innovations for Prisma SASE for protecting the hybrid workforce, including the general availability of Prisma SD-WAN bandwidth licensing on-demand and Okyo Garde Enterprise Edition.

The post Protecting The Hybrid Workforce With Palo Alto Networks Secure, Flexible SASE Solution appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Building many private virtual networks through Cloudflare Zero Trust

We built Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform to help companies rely on our network to connect their private networks securely, while improving performance and reducing operational burden. With it, you could build a single virtual private network, where all your connected private networks had to be uniquely identifiable.

Starting today, we are thrilled to announce that you can start building many segregated virtual private networks over Cloudflare Zero Trust, beginning with virtualized connectivity for the connectors Cloudflare WARP and Cloudflare Tunnel.

Connecting your private networks through Cloudflare

Consider your team, with various services hosted across distinct private networks, and employees accessing those resources. More than ever, those employees may be roaming, remote, or actually in a company office. Regardless, you need to ensure only they can access your private services. Even then, you want to have granular control over what each user can access within your network.

This is where Cloudflare can help you. We make our global, performant network available to you, acting as a virtual bridge between your employees and private services. With your employees’ devices running Cloudflare WARP, their traffic egresses through Cloudflare’s network. On the other side, your private services are behind Cloudflare Tunnel, accessible Continue reading

On Securing BGP

The US Federal Communications Commission recently asked for comments on securing Internet routing. While I worked on the responses offered by various organizations, I also put in my own response as an individual, which I’ve included below.

I am not providing this answer as a representative of any organization, but rather as an individual with long experience in the global standards and operations communities surrounding the Internet, and with long experience in routing and routing security.

I completely agree with the Notice of Inquiry that “networks are essential to the daily functioning of critical infrastructure [yet they] can be vulnerable to attack” due to insecurities in the BGP protocol. While proposed solutions exist that would increase the security of the BGP routing system, only some of these mechanisms are being widely deployed. This response will consider some of the reasons existing proposals are not deployed and suggest some avenues the Commission might explore to aid the community in developing and deploying solutions.

9: Measuring BGP Security.
At this point, I only know of the systems mentioned in the query for measuring BGP routing security incidents. There have been attempts to build other systems, but none of these systems have been Continue reading

Legal and Ethical Aspects of Privacy

My second post on privacy for network engineers is up over at Packet Pushers—

Given the arguments from the first article in this series, if privacy should be and is essential—what does the average network engineer do with this information? How does privacy impact network design and operations? To answer this question, we need to look at two other questions.

Meet The New WPA3 Wi-Fi Security Suite

WPA3, the latest Wi-Fi security suite, is finally making its way into products around the world. Here’s what you need to know for using it at home and in enterprise networks. What Is WPA? Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is the suite of standards that define security for both WPA-Personal (passphrase) and WPA-Enterprise (802.1X) based wireless […]

The post Meet The New WPA3 Wi-Fi Security Suite appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Privacy And Networking Part 2: Legal And Ethical Privacy

Given the arguments from the first article in this series, if privacy should be and is essential—what does the average network engineer do with this information? How does privacy impact network design and operations? To answer this question, we need to look at two other questions. First, what is private information, precisely? The network carries […]

The post Privacy And Networking Part 2: Legal And Ethical Privacy appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Mitigate Supply-Chain Attacks With Microsegmentation And ZTNA

This article originally appeared on Packet Pushers Ignition on January 12, 2021. In broad terms, the SolarWinds attack is a standard (though well-executed) supply-chain compromise that breaches a trusted source of software, hardware, or services to gain entry into an organization’s internal infrastructure. Once inside, it spreads to other systems, installs additional tools, compromises user […]

The post Mitigate Supply-Chain Attacks With Microsegmentation And ZTNA appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Video: IPv6 Trust Model

After discussing the basics of IPv6 security in the hands-on part of IPv6 security webinar webinar, Christopher Werny focused on the IPv6 trust model (aka “we’re all brothers and sisters on link-local").

Video: IPv6 Trust Model

After discussing the basics of IPv6 security in the hands-on part of IPv6 security webinar webinar, Christopher Werny focused on the IPv6 trust model (aka “we’re all brothers and sisters on link-local”).

Failed the CCIE lab. Now what?

This is a blog post that could’ve and perhaps should’ve been written many years ago. Knowing what happened in 2008 might only help very few with their CCIE journeys today. But on that summer afternoon, I made up my mind when the plane made a noisy landing in Tokyo, where many passengers had masks on, […]

The post Failed the CCIE lab. Now what? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

There is no point in rehashing the fact that CAPTCHA provides a terrible user experience. It's been discussed in detail before on this blog, and countless times elsewhere. One of the creators of the CAPTCHA has publicly lamented that he “unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles.” We don’t like them, and you don’t like them.

So we decided we’re going to stop using CAPTCHAs. Using an iterative platform approach, we have already reduced the number of CAPTCHAs we choose to serve by 91% over the past year.

Before we talk about how we did it, and how you can help, let's first start with a simple question.

Why in the world is CAPTCHA still used anyway?

If everyone agrees CAPTCHA is so bad, if there have been calls to get rid of it for 15 years, if the creator regrets creating it, why is it still widely used?

The frustrating truth is that CAPTCHA remains an effective tool for differentiating real human users from bots despite the existence of CAPTCHA-solving services. Of course, this comes with a huge trade off in terms Continue reading

WAF mitigations for Spring4Shell

A set of high profile vulnerabilities have been identified affecting the popular Java Spring Framework and related software components - generally being referred to as Spring4Shell.

Four CVEs have been released so far and are being actively updated as new information emerges. These vulnerabilities can result, in the worst case, in full remote code execution (RCE) compromise:

• CVE-2022-22947 - [official VMware post]
• CVE-2022-22950 - [official VMware post]
• CVE-2022-22963 - [official Spring project post]
• CVE-2022-22965 - [official Spring project post]

Customers using Java Spring and related software components, such as the Spring Cloud Gateway, should immediately review their software and update to the latest versions by following the official Spring project guidance.

The Cloudflare WAF team is actively monitoring these CVEs and has already deployed a number of new managed mitigation rules. Customers should review the rules listed below to ensure they are enabled while also patching the underlying Java Spring components.

CVE-2022-22947

A new rule has been developed and deployed for this CVE with an emergency release on March 29:

Managed Rule Spring - CVE:CVE-2022-22947

• WAF rule ID: e777f95584ba429796856007fbe6c869
• Legacy rule ID: 100522

Note that the above rule is disabled by Continue reading

Future-proofing SaltStack

At Cloudflare, we are preparing the Internet and our infrastructure for the arrival of quantum computers. A sufficiently large and stable quantum computer will easily break commonly deployed cryptography such as RSA. Luckily there is a solution: we can swap out the vulnerable algorithms with so-called post-quantum algorithms that are believed to be secure even against quantum computers. For a particular system, this means that we first need to figure out which cryptography is used, for what purpose, and under which (performance) constraints. Most systems use the TLS protocol in a standard way, and there a post-quantum upgrade is routine. However, some systems such as SaltStack, the focus of this blog post, are more interesting. This blog post chronicles our path of making SaltStack quantum-secure, so welcome to this adventure: this secret extra post-quantum blog post!

SaltStack, or simply Salt, is an open-source infrastructure management tool used by many organizations. At Cloudflare, we rely on Salt for provisioning and automation, and it has allowed us to grow our infrastructure quickly.

Salt uses a bespoke cryptographic protocol to secure its communication. Thus, the first step to a post-quantum Salt was to examine what the protocol was actually doing. In Continue reading

What Is Zero Trust Security?

Zero Trust is a framework for security in which all users of an application, software, system, or network, inside or outside of an organization, must be authenticated, verified, and frequently validated before being granted access to specific data or tools within the company’s network. In the zero trust framework, networks can be in the cloud, hybrid, or on-premise with employees in any location. The assumption is that no users or devices are to be trusted with access without meeting the necessary validation requirements. In today’s modern digital transformation forward environment, the zero-trust security framework helps to ensure infrastructure and data are kept safe, and more modern business challenges are handled appropriately. For example, as the pandemic has evolved, securing remote workers and their access will be of greater importance for organizations that want to scale their workforce. Ransomware threats and attacks are increasing, and zero trust implementation can detect these threats, from novel ones to custom-crafted malware, far before they cause harm. What Foundation Makes up Zero Trust? Zero Trust security is built on the architecture established by the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST). The