Custom Headers for Cloudflare Pages
Until today, Cloudflare Workers has been a great solution to setting headers, but we wanted to create an even smoother developer experience. Today, we're excited to announce that Pages now natively supports custom headers on your projects! Simply create a _headers file in the build directory of your project and within it, define the rules you want to apply.
/developer-docs/*
X-Hiring: Looking for a job? We're hiring engineers
(https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/jobs)What can you set with custom headers?
Being able to set custom headers is useful for a variety of reasons — let’s explore some of your most popular use cases.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When you create a Pages project, a pages.dev deployment is created for your project which enables you to get started immediately and easily preview changes as you iterate. However, we realize this poses an issue — publishing multiple copies of your website can harm your rankings in search engine results. One way to solve this is by disabling indexing on all pages.dev subdomains, but we see many using their pages.dev subdomain as their primary domain. With today’s announcement you can attach headers such as X-Robots-Tag to hint to Google and other search Continue reading
Review: Dune (2021)
One of the most important classic sci-fi stories is the book "Dune" from Frank Herbert. It was recently made into a movie. I thought I'd write a quick review.
The summary is this: just read the book. It's a classic for a good reason, and you'll be missing a lot by not reading it.
But the movie Dune (2021) movie is very good. The most important thing to know is see it in IMAX. IMAX is this huge screen technology that partly wraps around the viewer, and accompanied by huge speakers that overwhelm you with sound. If you watch it in some other format, what was visually stunning becomes merely very pretty.
This is Villeneuve's trademark, which you can see in his other works, like his sequel to Bladerunner. The purpose is to marvel at the visuals in every scene. The story telling is just enough to hold the visuals together. I mean, he also seems to do a good job with the story telling, but it's just not the reason to go see the movie. (I can't tell -- I've read the book, so see the story differently than those of you who haven't).
Beyond the story Continue reading
Fast Friday Thoughts From Security Field Day
It’s a busy week for me thanks to Security Field Day but I didn’t want to leave you without some thoughts that have popped up this week from the discussions we’ve been having. Security is one of those topics that creates a lot of thought-provoking ideas and makes you seriously wonder if you’re doing it right all the time.
- Never underestimate the value of having plumbing that connects all your systems. You may look at a solution and think to yourself “All this does is aggregate data from other sources”. Which raises the question: How do you do it now? Sure, antivirus fires alerts like a car alarm. But when you get breached and find out that those alerts caught it weeks ago you’re going to wish you had a better idea of what was going on. You need a way to send that data somewhere to be dealt with and cataloged properly. This is one of the biggest reasons why machine learning is being applied to the massive amount of data we gather in security. Having an algorithm working to find the important pieces means you don’t miss things that are important to you.
- Not every solution is going Continue reading
Cloudflare for SaaS for All, now Generally Available!
During Developer Week a few months ago, we opened up the Beta for Cloudflare for SaaS: a one-stop shop for SaaS providers looking to provide fast load times, unparalleled redundancy, and the strongest security to their customers.
Since then, we’ve seen numerous developers integrate with our technology, allowing them to spend their time building out their solution instead of focusing on the burdens of running a fast, secure, and scalable infrastructure — after all, that’s what we’re here for.
Today, we are very excited to announce that Cloudflare for SaaS is generally available, so that every customer, big and small, can use Cloudflare for SaaS to continue scaling and building their SaaS business.
What is Cloudflare for SaaS?
If you’re running a SaaS company, you have customers that are fully reliant on you for your service. That means you’re responsible for keeping their domain fast, secure, and protected. But this isn’t simple. There’s a long checklist you need to get through to put a solution in your customers’ hands:
- Set up an origin server
- Encrypt your customers’ traffic
- Keep your customers online
- Boost the performance of global customers
- Support vanity domains
- Protect against attacks and bots
- Scale for growth
- Continue reading
Getting Cloudflare Tunnels to connect to the Cloudflare Network with QUIC
I work on Cloudflare Tunnel, which lets customers quickly connect their private services and networks through the Cloudflare network without having to expose their public IPs or ports through their firewall. Tunnel is managed for users by cloudflared, a tool that runs on the same network as the private services. It proxies traffic for these services via Cloudflare, and users can then access these services securely through the Cloudflare network.
Recently, I was trying to get Cloudflare Tunnel to connect to the Cloudflare network using a UDP protocol, QUIC. While doing this, I ran into an interesting connectivity problem unique to UDP. In this post I will talk about how I went about debugging this connectivity issue beyond the land of firewalls, and how some interesting differences between UDP and TCP came into play when sending network packets.
How does Cloudflare Tunnel work?
cloudflared works by opening several connections to different servers on the Cloudflare edge. Currently, these are long-lived TCP-based connections proxied over HTTP/2 frames. When Cloudflare receives a request to a hostname, it is proxied through these connections to the local service behind cloudflared.
While our HTTP/2 protocol mode works great, we’d like to improve a Continue reading
Zero Trust — Not a Buzzword
Over the last few years, Zero Trust, a term coined by Forrester, has picked up a lot of steam. Zero Trust, at its core, is a network architecture and security framework focusing on not having a distinction between external and internal access environments, and never trusting users/roles.
In the Zero Trust model, the network only delivers applications and data to authenticated and authorized users and devices, and gives organisations visibility into what is being accessed and to apply controls based on behavioral analysis. It gained popularity as the media reported on several high profile breaches caused by misuse, abuse or exploitation of VPN systems, breaches into end-users’ devices with access to other systems within the network, or breaches through third parties — either by exploiting access or compromising software repositories in order to deploy malicious code. This would later be used to provide further access into internal systems, or to deploy malware and potentially ransomware into environments well within the network perimeter.
When we first started talking to CISOs about Zero Trust, it felt like it was just a buzzword, and CISOs were bombarded with messaging from different cybersecurity vendors offering them Zero Trust solutions. Recently, another term, SASE (Secure Continue reading
Aruba Puts DPUs Into New Top-of-Rack Switch – 5 Questions
Aruba Networks has announced a new top-of-rack switch that includes two Data Processing Units from Pensando that can offload and accelerate functions such as stateful firewalling and DDoS protection. How does Aruba's approach compare to other methods for distributing services in a data center?
The post Aruba Puts DPUs Into New Top-of-Rack Switch – 5 Questions appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Privacy-Preserving Compromised Credential Checking
Today we’re announcing a public demo and an open-sourced Go implementation of a next-generation, privacy-preserving compromised credential checking protocol called MIGP (“Might I Get Pwned”, a nod to Troy Hunt’s “Have I Been Pwned”). Compromised credential checking services are used to alert users when their credentials might have been exposed in data breaches. Critically, the ‘privacy-preserving’ property of the MIGP protocol means that clients can check for leaked credentials without leaking any information to the service about the queried password, and only a small amount of information about the queried username. Thus, not only can the service inform you when one of your usernames and passwords may have become compromised, but it does so without exposing any unnecessary information, keeping credential checking from becoming a vulnerability itself. The ‘next-generation’ property comes from the fact that MIGP advances upon the current state of the art in credential checking services by allowing clients to not only check if their exact password is present in a data breach, but to check if similar passwords have been exposed as well.
For example, suppose your password last year was amazon20\$, and you change your password each year (so your current password is amazon21\$). Continue reading
Research Directions in Password Security
As Internet users, we all deal with passwords every day. With so many different services, each with their own login systems, we have to somehow keep track of the credentials we use with each of these services. This situation leads some users to delegate credential storage to password managers like LastPass or a browser-based password manager, but this is far from universal. Instead, many people still rely on old-fashioned human memory, which has its limitations — leading to reused passwords and to security problems. This blog post discusses how Cloudflare Research is exploring how to minimize password exposure and thwart password attacks.
The Problem of Password Reuse
Because it’s too difficult to remember many distinct passwords, people often reuse them across different online services. When breached password datasets are leaked online, attackers can take advantage of these to conduct “credential stuffing attacks”. In a credential stuffing attack, an attacker tests breached credentials against multiple online login systems in an attempt to hijack user accounts. These attacks are highly effective because users tend to reuse the same credentials across different websites, and they have quickly become one of the most prevalent types of online guessing attacks. Automated attacks can be run Continue reading
Fact check: that “forensics” of the Mesa image is crazy
Tina Peters, the elections clerk from Mesa County (Colorado) went rogue, creating a "disk-image" of the election server, and posting that image to the public Internet. Conspiracy theorists have been analyzing the disk-image trying to find anomalies supporting their conspiracy-theories. A recent example is this "forensics" report. In this blogpost, I debunk that report.
I suppose calling somebody a "conspiracy theorist" is insulting, but there's three objective ways we can identify them as such.
The first is when they use the logic "everything we can't explain is proof of the conspiracy". In other words, since there's no other rational explanation, the only remaining explanation is the conspiracy-theory. But there can be other possible explanations -- just ones unknown to the person because they aren't smart enough to understand them. We see that here: the person writing this report doesn't understand some basic concepts, like "airgapped" networks.
This leads to the second way to recognize a conspiracy-theory, when it demands this one thing that'll clear things up. Here, it's demanding that a manual audit/recount of Mesa County be performed. But it won't satisfy them. The Maricopa audit in neighboring Colorado, whose recount found no fraud, didn't clear anything up Continue reading
Why Does DHCPv6 Matter?
In case you missed it, there’s a new season of Lack of DHCPv6 on Android soap opera on v6ops mailing list. Before going into the juicy details, I wanted to look at the big picture: why would anyone care about lack of DHCPv6 on Android?
Please note that I’m not a DHCPv6 fan. DHCPv6 is just a tool not unlike sink plunger – nobody loves it (I hope), but when you need it, you better have it handy.
The requirements for DHCPv6-based address allocation come primarily from enterprise environments facing legal/compliance/other layer 8-10 reasons to implement policy (are you allowed to use the network), control (we want to decide who uses the network) and attribution (if something bad happens, we want to know who did it).
Introducing SSL/TLS Recommender
Seven years ago, Cloudflare made HTTPS availability for any Internet property easy and free with Universal SSL. At the time, few websites — other than those that processed sensitive data like passwords and credit card information — were using HTTPS because of how difficult it was to set up.
However, as we all started using the Internet for more and more private purposes (communication with loved ones, financial transactions, shopping, healthcare, etc.) the need for encryption became apparent. Tools like Firesheep demonstrated how easily attackers could snoop on people using public Wi-Fi networks at coffee shops and airports. The Snowden revelations showed the ease with which governments could listen in on unencrypted communications at scale. We have seen attempts by browser vendors to increase HTTPS adoption such as the recent announcement by Chromium for loading websites on HTTPS by default. Encryption has become a vital part of the modern Internet, not just to keep your information safe, but to keep you safe.
When it was launched, Universal SSL doubled the number of sites on the Internet using HTTPS. We are building on that with SSL/TLS Recommender, a tool that guides you to stronger configurations for the backend connection Continue reading
Dynamic Process Isolation: Research by Cloudflare and TU Graz
Last year, I wrote about the Cloudflare Workers security model, including how we fight Spectre attacks. In that post, I explained that there is no known complete defense against Spectre — regardless of whether you're using isolates, processes, containers, or virtual machines to isolate tenants. What we do have, though, is a huge number of tools to increase the cost of a Spectre attack, to the point where it becomes infeasible. Cloudflare Workers has been designed from the very beginning with protection against side channel attacks in mind, and because of this we have been able to incorporate many defenses that other platforms — such as virtual machines and web browsers — cannot. However, the performance and scalability requirements of edge compute make it infeasible to run every Worker in its own private process, so we cannot rely on the usual defenses provided by the operating system kernel and address space separation.
Given our different approach, we cannot simply rely on others to tell us if we are safe. We had to do our own research. To do this we partnered with researchers at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) to study the impact of Spectre on our environment. The Continue reading
Handshake Encryption: Endgame (an ECH update)
Privacy and security are fundamental to Cloudflare, and we believe in and champion the use of cryptography to help provide these fundamentals for customers, end-users, and the Internet at large. In the past, we helped specify, implement, and ship TLS 1.3, the latest version of the transport security protocol underlying the web, to all of our users. TLS 1.3 vastly improved upon prior versions of the protocol with respect to security, privacy, and performance: simpler cryptographic algorithms, more handshake encryption, and fewer round trips are just a few of the many great features of this protocol.
TLS 1.3 was a tremendous improvement over TLS 1.2, but there is still room for improvement. Sensitive metadata relating to application or user intent is still visible in plaintext on the wire. In particular, all client parameters, including the name of the target server the client is connecting to, are visible in plaintext. For obvious reasons, this is problematic from a privacy perspective: Even if your application traffic to crypto.cloudflare.com is encrypted, the fact you’re visiting crypto.cloudflare.com can be quite revealing.
And so, in collaboration with other participants in the standardization community and members of Continue reading
Privacy Pass v3: the new privacy bits
In November 2017, we released our implementation of a privacy preserving protocol to let users prove that they are humans without enabling tracking. When you install Privacy Pass’s browser extension, you get tokens when you solve a Cloudflare CAPTCHA which can be used to avoid needing to solve one again... The redeemed token is cryptographically unlinkable to the token originally provided by the server. That is why Privacy Pass is privacy preserving.
In October 2019, Privacy Pass reached another milestone. We released Privacy Pass Extension v2.0 that includes a new service provider (hCaptcha) which provides a way to redeem a token not only with CAPTCHAs in the Cloudflare challenge pages but also hCaptcha CAPTCHAs in any website. When you encounter any hCaptcha CAPTCHA in any website, including the ones not behind Cloudflare, you can redeem a token to pass the CAPTCHA.
We believe Privacy Pass solves an important problem — balancing privacy and security for bot mitigation— but we think there’s more to be done in terms of both the codebase and the protocol. We improved the codebase by redesigning how the service providers interact with the core extension. At the same time, we made progress on the Continue reading
100 terabyte home NAS
So, as a nerd, let's say you need 100 terabytes of home storage. What do you do?
My solution would be a commercial NAS RAID, like from Synology, QNAP, or Asustor. I'm a nerd, and I have setup my own Linux systems with RAID, but I'd rather get a commercial product. When a disk fails, and a disk will always eventually fail, then I want something that will loudly beep at me and make it easy to replace the drive and repair the RAID.
Some choices you have are:
- vendor (Synology, QNAP, and Asustor are the vendors I know and trust the most)
- number of bays (you want 8 to 12)
- redundancy (you want at least 2 if not 3 disks)
- filesystem (btrfs or ZFS) [not btrfs-raid builtin, but btrfs on top of RAID]
- drives (NAS optimized between $20/tb and $30/tb)
- networking (at least 2-gbps bonded, but box probably can't use all of 10gbps)
- backup (big external USB drives)
The products I link above all have at least 8 drive bays. When you google "NAS", you'll get a list of smaller products. You don't want them. You want somewhere between 8 and 12 drives.
The reason is that Continue reading
Helping Apache Servers stay safe from zero-day path traversal attacks (CVE-2021-41773)
On September 29, 2021, the Apache Security team was alerted to a path traversal vulnerability being actively exploited (zero-day) against Apache HTTP Server version 2.4.49. The vulnerability, in some instances, can allow an attacker to fully compromise the web server via remote code execution (RCE) or at the very least access sensitive files. CVE number 2021-41773 has been assigned to this issue. Both Linux and Windows based servers are vulnerable.
An initial patch was made available on October 4 with an update to 2.4.50, however, this was found to be insufficient resulting in an additional patch bumping the version number to 2.4.51 on October 7th (CVE-2021-42013).
Customers using Apache HTTP Server versions 2.4.49 and 2.4.50 should immediately update to version 2.4.51 to mitigate the vulnerability. Details on how to update can be found on the official Apache HTTP Server project site.
Any Cloudflare customer with the setting normalize URLs to origin turned on have always been protected against this vulnerability.
Additionally, customers who have access to the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF), receive additional protection by turning on the rule with the following IDs:
1c3d3022129c48e9bb52e953fe8ceb2f(for Continue reading
Hedge 103: BGP Security with Geoff Huston
Our community has been talking about BGP security for over 20 years. While MANRS and the RPKI have made some headway in securing BGP, the process of deciding on a method to provide at least the information providers need to make more rational decisions about the validity of individual routes is still ongoing. Geoff Huston joins Alvaro, Russ, and Tom to discuss how we got here and whether we will learn from our mistakes.
May I ask who’s calling, please? A recent rise in VoIP DDoS attacks
Over the past month, multiple Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers have been targeted by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks from entities claiming to be REvil. The multi-vector attacks combined both L7 attacks targeting critical HTTP websites and API endpoints, as well as L3/4 attacks targeting VoIP server infrastructure. In some cases, these attacks resulted in significant impact to the targets’ VoIP services and website/API availability.
Cloudflare’s network is able to effectively protect and accelerate voice and video infrastructure because of our global reach, sophisticated traffic filtering suite, and unique perspective on attack patterns and threat intelligence.
If you or your organization have been targeted by DDoS attacks, ransom attacks and/or extortion attempts, seek immediate help to protect your Internet properties. We recommend not paying the ransom, and to report it to your local law enforcement agencies.
Voice (and video, emojis, conferences, cat memes and remote classrooms) over IP
Voice over IP (VoIP) is a term that's used to describe a group of technologies that allow for communication of multimedia over the Internet. This technology enables your FaceTime call with your friends, your virtual classroom lessons over Zoom and even some “normal” calls you make from your cell phone.
