Security Best Practices for Cloud-Native and Hybrid Cloud Organizations

Both cloud-native and traditional organizations must implement a security practice that offers automation, abstraction, flexibility, visibility, and is application-aware.

Buyer’s Guide: Modern Web-Scale Backup and Recovery

The Buyer’s Guide to Modern Backup is the definitive resource to help you make the right choice for your next data protection solution. Download the buyer's guide today.

CNCF, Eclipse Foundation Push Kubernetes to the Edge

The Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group is looking to see how far it can push the centralized Kubernetes platform out into the distributed edge and IoT ecosystem.

The QUICening

Six o’clock already, I was just in the middle of a dream, now I’m up, awake, looking at my Twitter stream. As I do that the Twitter app is making multiple API calls over HTTPS to Twitter’s servers somewhere on the Internet.

Those HTTPS connections are running over TCP via my home WiFi and broadband connection. All’s well inside the house, the WiFi connection is interference free thanks to my eero system, the broadband connection is stable and so there’s no packet loss, and my broadband provider’s connection to Twitter’s servers is also loss free.

Those are the perfect conditions for HTTPS running over TCP. Not a packet dropped, not a bit of jitter, no congestion. It’s even the perfect conditions for HTTP/2 where multiple streams of requests and responses are being sent from my phone to websites and APIs as I boot my morning. Unlike HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 is able to use a single TCP connection for multiple, simultaneously in flight requests. That has a significant speed advantage over the old way (one request after another per TCP connection) when conditions are good.

But I have to catch an early train, got to be to work by nine, so Continue reading

BGP Security: A Gentle Reminder that Networking is Business

At NANOG on the Road (NotR) in September of 2018, I participated in a panel on BGP security—specifically the deployment of Route Origin Authentication (ROA), with some hints and overtones of path validation by carrying signatures in BGP updates (BGPsec). This is an area I have been working in for… 20 years? … at this point, so I have seen the argument develop across these years many times, and in many ways. What always strikes me about this discussion, whenever and wherever it is aired, is the clash between business realities and the desire for “someone to do something about routing security in the DFZ, already!” What also strikes me about these conversations it the number of times very fundamental concepts end up being explained to folks who are “new to the problem.”

Part of the problem here is Continue reading

Encrypt it or lose it: how encrypted SNI works

Today we announced support for encrypted SNI, an extension to the TLS 1.3 protocol that improves privacy of Internet users by preventing on-path observers, including ISPs, coffee shop owners and firewalls, from intercepting the TLS Server Name Indication (SNI) extension and using it to determine which websites users are visiting.

Encrypted SNI, together with other Internet security features already offered by Cloudflare for free, will make it harder to censor content and track users on the Internet. Read on to learn how it works.

SNWhy?

The TLS Server Name Indication (SNI) extension, originally standardized back in 2003, lets servers host multiple TLS-enabled websites on the same set of IP addresses, by requiring clients to specify which site they want to connect to during the initial TLS handshake. Without SNI the server wouldn’t know, for example, which certificate to serve to the client, or which configuration to apply to the connection.

The client adds the SNI extension containing the hostname of the site it’s connecting to to the ClientHello message. It sends the ClientHello to the server during the TLS handshake. Unfortunately the ClientHello message is sent unencrypted, due to the fact that client and server don’t share Continue reading

Encrypting SNI: Fixing One of the Core Internet Bugs

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010. Since then, we've considered September 27th our birthday. This Thursday we'll be turning 8 years old.

Ever since our first birthday, we've used the occasion to launch new products or services. Over the years we came to the conclusion that the right thing to do to celebrate our birthday wasn't so much about launching products that we could make money from but instead to do things that were gifts back to our users and the Internet in general. My cofounder Michelle wrote about this tradition in a great blog post yesterday.

Personally, one of my proudest moments at Cloudflare came on our birthday in 2014 when we made HTTPS support free for all our users. At the time, people called us crazy — literally and repeatedly. Frankly, internally we had significant debates about whether we were crazy since encryption was the primary reason why people upgraded from a free account to a paid account.

But it was the right thing to do. The fact that encryption wasn't built into the web from the beginning was, in our mind, a bug. Today, almost exactly four years later, the web is nearly 80% encrypted thanks to Continue reading

Cloudflare Turns 8 — here’s what we mean by a “better Internet”

I have always loved birthdays. It is a chance to get together with loved ones, a chance to have fun and a chance to reflect on anything you want to keep doing or change in the upcoming year. At Cloudflare, we’ve embraced celebrating our birthday as well.

This week, Cloudflare turns 8 years old. It feels like just yesterday that Matthew, Lee, Matthieu, Ian, Sri, Chris, Damon and I stepped on stage at Techcrunch Disrupt to launch Cloudflare to the world. Since then, we have celebrated our birthday every year by giving a gift back to our customers and the Internet. This year, we plan to celebrate each day with a new product benefiting our community. Or in other words, it is a weeklong birthday celebration. Like I said, I love birthdays!

The Cloudflare team when we launched the service at Techcrunch Disrupt during September 27 to 29, 2010 – Matthieu, Chris, Sri, Ian, Lee, Matthew, Michelle and Damon.

While I can’t share exactly what we’re releasing every day — after all who doesn’t like a surprise? — I wanted to share some thoughts on how we decide what to release birthday week.

Our mission at Cloudflare is to help Continue reading

Cyber Threat Alliance Reports 459% Spike in Cryptomining Malware

“If you’ve got mining happening on your network, you probably have other bad stuff happening on your network, and it’s probably much worse than mining,” said CTA’s Neil Jenkins.

GitLab Gets $100M Series D, Hits $1B Valuation

The software repository used the news to take a swipe at rival GitHub, which Microsoft purchased for $7.5 billion.

Roughtime: Securing Time with Digital Signatures

When you visit a secure website, it offers you a TLS certificate that asserts its identity. Every certificate has an expiration date, and when it’s passed due, it is no longer valid. The idea is almost as old as the web itself: limiting the lifetime of certificates is meant to reduce the risk in case a TLS server’s secret key is compromised.

Certificates aren’t the only cryptographic artifacts that expire. When you visit a site protected by Cloudflare, we also tell you whether its certificate has been revoked (see our blog post on OCSP stapling) — for example, due to the secret key being compromised — and this value (a so-called OCSP staple) has an expiration date, too.

Thus, to determine if a certificate is valid and hasn’t been revoked, your system needs to know the current time. Indeed, time is crucial for the security of TLS and myriad other protocols. To help keep clocks in sync, we are announcing a free, high-availability, and low-latency authenticated time service called Roughtime, available at roughtime.cloudlare.com on port 2002.

Time is tricky

It may surprise you to learn that, in practice, clients’ clocks are heavily skewed. A recent study of Continue reading

Can NFV Help in Rolling Out DDoS Mitigation Services?

Moving the security perimeter into the cloud helps companies that are struggling with the budget and talent needed to keep security in-house.

Introducing the Cloudflare Onion Service

• When: a cold San Francisco summer afternoon
• Where: Room 305, Cloudflare
• Who: 2 from Cloudflare + 9 from the Tor Project

What could go wrong?

Bit of Background

Two years ago this week Cloudflare introduced Opportunistic Encryption, a feature that provided additional security and performance benefits to websites that had not yet moved to HTTPS. Indeed, back in the old days some websites only used HTTP --- weird, right? “Opportunistic” here meant that the server advertised support for HTTP/2 via an HTTP Alternative Service header in the hopes that any browser that recognized the protocol could take advantage of those benefits in subsequent requests to that domain.

Around the same time, CEO Matthew Prince wrote about the importance and challenges of privacy on the Internet and tasked us to find a solution that provides convenience, security, and anonymity.

From neutralizing fingerprinting vectors and everyday browser trackers that Privacy Badger feeds on, all the way to mitigating correlation attacks that only big actors are capable of, guaranteeing privacy is a complicated challenge. Fortunately, the Tor Project addresses this extensive adversary model in Tor Browser.

However, the Internet is full of bad actors, and distinguishing Continue reading

How do you explain the unreasonable effectiveness of cloud security?

With the enormous attack surface of cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, why aren't there more security problems? Data breaches and cyber attacks occur daily. How do you explain the unreasonable effectiveness of cloud security?

Google has an ebook on their security approach; Microsoft has some web pages. Both are the equivalent of that person who is disgustingly healthy and you ask them how they do it and they say "I don't know. I just eat right, exercise, and get plenty of sleep." Not all that useful. Most of us want a hack, a trick to good health. Who wants to eat right? 

I'm sure Amazon also eats right, exercises, and gets plenty of sleep (probably not the people who work there), but AWS also has a secret that when that disgustingly healthy person starts talking about at a party, you just can't help leaning in and listening. 

What's the trick to 6-pack security? Proving systems correct. Does your datacenter do that? I didn't think so. AWS does. 

Dr. Byron Cook gave an enthusiastic talk on Formal Reasoning about the Security of Amazon Web Service. He's clearly excited about finally applying his research in a Continue reading

Trump and Peekaboo: Hackers Target Political Malware, Surveillance Software

McAfee says Presidents Trump and Obama have malware campaigns named after them. Tenable discloses a flaw that could affect hundreds of thousands of security cameras globally.

RPKI and BGP: our path to securing Internet Routing

This article will talk about our approach to network security using technologies like RPKI to sign Internet routes and protect our users and customers from route hijacks and misconfigurations. We are proud to announce we have started deploying active filtering by using RPKI for routing decisions and signing our routes.

Back in April, articles including our blog post on BGP and route-leaks were reported in the news, highlighting how IP addresses can be redirected maliciously or by mistake. While enormous, the underlying routing infrastructure, the bedrock of the Internet, has remained mostly unsecured.

At Cloudflare, we decided to secure our part of the Internet by protecting our customers and everyone using our services including our recursive resolver 1.1.1.1.

From BGP to RPKI, how do we Internet ?

A prefix is a range of IP addresses, for instance, 10.0.0.0/24, whose first address is 10.0.0.0 and the last one is 10.0.0.255. A computer or a server usually have one. A router creates a list of reachable prefixes called a routing table and uses this routing table to transport packets from a source to a destination.  

On the Internet, network Continue reading

RPKI – The required cryptographic upgrade to BGP routing

We have talked about the BGP Internet routing protocol before. We have talked about how we build a more resilient network and how we can see outages at a country-level via BGP. We have even talked about the network community that is vital to the operation of the global Internet.

Today we need to talk about why existing operational practices for BGP routing and filtering have to significantly improve in order to finally stop route leaks and hijacks; which are sadly pervasive in today’s Internet routing world. In fact, the subtle art of running a BGP network and the various tools (both online and within your a networks subsystems) that are vital to making the Internet routing world a safe and reliable place to operate need to improve.

Internet routing and BGP and security along with its operational expertise must improve globally.

Nothing specific triggered today’s writing except the fact that Cloudflare has decided that it's high-time we took a leadership role to finally secure BGP routing. We believe that each and every network needs to change its mindset towards BGP security both on a day-by-day and a long-term basis.

It's time to stop Continue reading

VMware NSX-T Data Center in Evaluation for Common Criteria EAL4+ Certification

VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.x is now under evaluation for Common Criteria certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ with BSI, Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security. Common Criteria is an internationally recognized standard (ISO-15408) that defines, validates, and assures security features and capabilities of IT security products. To see the evaluation status for VMware NSX-T 2.x, visit the German BSI certification website and reference certificate # BSI-DSZ-CC-1099.

VMware NSX-T was introduced to help organizations meet the stringent security demands of containerized workloads, multi-hypervisor, and multi-cloud. And this latest milestone for NSX-T 2.x reinforces VMware’s continuing commitment to deliver secure software to our customers. During the Common Criteria certification process, VMware NSX-T will undergo a thorough and rigorous evaluation methodology, with testing performed by a commercial Common Criteria Evaluation Facility under the oversight of the Certification Body. The Common Criteria certification acts as a seal of assurance for the federal government, its agencies, contractors and other organizations and assures that the product complies with strict security requirements specified within the designated level.

Within the VMware NSX portfolio, we have a long history of investing in certification efforts. For example, VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.x also Continue reading

Intel’s Growing Chip Portfolio Stretches From Cloud to Edge

Intel may be best known for its x86 server chips, but its growing silicon portfolio targets cloud and edge applications, as well as 5G.

ARM Supports Chip Makers in Servers, IoT, and 5G

Instead of manufacturing chips, ARM provides its instruction set architecture to its customers — such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, NXP, and Marvell — and those companies manufacture the chips.