Cloudflare response to CPDoS exploits
Three vulnerabilities were disclosed as Cache Poisoning Denial of Service attacks in a paper written by Hoai Viet Nguyen, Luigi Lo Iacono, and Hannes Federrath of TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences. These attacks are similar to the cache poisoning attacks presented last year at DEFCON.
Most customers do not have to take any action to protect themselves from the newly disclosed vulnerabilities. Some configuration changes are recommended if you are a Cloudflare customer running unpatched versions of Microsoft IIS and have request filtering enabled on your origin or b) have forced caching of HTTP response code 400 through the use of page rules or Cloudflare Workers.
We have not seen any attempted exploitation of the vulnerabilities described in this paper.
Maintaining the integrity of our content caching infrastructure and ensuring our customers are able to quickly and reliably serve the content they expect to their visitors is of paramount importance to us. In practice, Cloudflare ensures caches serve the content they should in two ways:
- We build our caching infrastructure to behave in ways compliant with industry standards.
- We actively add defenses to our caching logic to protect customers from common caching pitfalls. We see our job as Continue reading


