IPv6 and the Revenge of the Stupid Bridges

This blog post describes another “OMG, this cannot possibly be true” scenario discovered during the netlab VRRP integration testing.

I wanted to test whether we got the nasty nuances of VRRPv3 IPv6 configuration right on all supported platforms and created a simple lab topology in which the device-under-test and an Arista cEOS container would be connected to two IPv6 networks (Arista EOS is a lovely device to use when testing a VRRP cluster because it produces JSON-formatted show vrrp printouts).

Most platforms worked as expected, but Aruba CX, Cumulus Linux with NVUE, and Dell OS10 consistently failed the tests. We were stumped until Jeroen van Bemmel discovered that the Arista container forwards IPv6 router advertisements between the two LAN segments.

Read more …

Exploring RISC-V vector instructions

It finally happened! A raspberry pi like device, with a RISC-V CPU supporting the v extension. Aka RVV. Aka vector instructions.

I bought one, and explored it a bit.

SIMD background

First some background on SIMD.

SIMD is a set of instructions allowing you to do the same operation to multiple independent pieces of data. As an example, say you had four 8 bit integers, and you wanted to multiply them all by 2, then add 1. You could do this with a single operation without any special instructions.

    # x86 example assembly.

    mov eax, [myvalues]  # load our four bytes.
    mov ebx, 2           # we want to multiply by two
    imul eax, ebx        # single operation, multiple data!
                         # After this, eax contains 0x02040608
    add eax, 0x01010101  # single operation, multiple data!
                         # After this, eax contains 0x03050709
    mov [myvalues], eax  # store back the new value.

section .data
  myvalues db 1,2,3,4

Success, right? No, of course not. This naive code doesn’t handle over/underflow, and doesn’t even remotely work for floating point data. For that, we need special SIMD instructions.

x86 and ARM have gone the way of fixed sized registers. In 1997 Intel introduced MMX, to great Continue reading

Lab as Code – Part2

This is the follow on to part1 where I was looking at how easy it is to deploy initial EVE-NG and CML lab setups from a declarative YAML file. Although both products are not really designed with that in mind I did manage to accomplish it with a relatively minimal amount of complexity in the topology file using a custom lab_builder tool. Next up is to give it a go with containerlab and netlab, I am expecting these to be a whole lot simpler as lab as code is the very ethos that they are designed for.

From Python to Go 017. Interaction With Network Devices Using NETCONF.

Hello my friend,

We continue exploring programmable network management using Python and Go (Golang) as programming languages. In today’s blog post we’ll cover how to interact with network devices using NETCONF.

How To Chose Which API To Use?

There are many APIs (Application Programmable Interfaces) out there. We already covered SSH and now covering NETCONF. And there are a few more existing, which we are going to cover. Cannot we just stick to a single API for all use cases. The truth is that each API has its own advantages and disadvantages, as well as design patterns and areas, where it shall be used. As such, each of them is important and valuable.

And in our training programs we do deep-dive in all these APIs. Enrol today:

We offer the following training programs in network automation for you:

During these trainings you will learn the following topics:

  • Success and failure strategies to build the automation tools.
  • Principles of software developments and the most useful and convenient tools.
  • Data encoding (free-text, XML, JSON, YAML, Protobuf).
  • Model-driven Continue reading

RDP without the risk: Cloudflare’s browser-based solution for secure third-party access

Short-lived SSH access made its debut on Cloudflare’s SASE platform in October 2024. Leveraging the knowledge gained through the BastionZero acquisition, short-lived SSH access enables organizations to apply Zero Trust controls in front of their Linux servers. That was just the beginning, however, as we are thrilled to announce the release of a long-requested feature: clientless, browser-based support for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Built on top of Cloudflare’s modern proxy architecture, our RDP proxy offers a secure and performant solution that, critically, is also easy to set up, maintain, and use.

Security challenges of RDP 

Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) was born in 1998 with Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition. If you have never heard of that Windows version, it’s because, well, there’s been 16 major Windows releases since then. Regardless, RDP is still used across thousands of organizations to enable remote access to Windows servers. It’s a bit of a strange protocol that relies on a graphical user interface to display screen captures taken in very close succession in order to emulate the interactions on the remote Windows server. (There’s more happening here beyond the screen captures, including drawing commands, bitmap updates, and even video streams. Continue reading

Detecting sensitive data and misconfigurations in AWS and GCP with Cloudflare One

Today is the final day of Security Week 2025, and after a great week of blog posts across a variety of topics, we’re excited to share the latest on Cloudflare’s data security products.

This announcement takes us to Cloudflare’s SASE platform, Cloudflare One, used by enterprise security and IT teams to manage the security of their employees, applications, and third-party tools, all in one place.

Starting today, Cloudflare One users can now use the CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) product to integrate with and scan Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 and Google Cloud Storage, for posture- and Data Loss Prevention (DLP)-related security issues. Create a free account to check it out.

Scanning both point-in-time and continuously, users can identify misconfigurations in Identity and Access Management (IAM), bucket, and object settings, and detect sensitive information, like Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, or any other pattern using regex, in cloud storage objects.

Cloud DLP

Over the last few years, our customers — predominantly security and IT teams — have told us about their appreciation for CASB’s simplicity and effectiveness as a SaaS security product. Its number of supported integrations, its ease of setup, and speed in identifying critical issues Continue reading

Enhance data protection in Microsoft Outlook with Cloudflare One’s new DLP Assist

Cloudflare Email Security customers using Microsoft Outlook can now enhance their data protection using our new DLP Assist capability. This application scans emails in real time as users compose them, identifying potential data loss prevention (DLP) violations, such as Social Security or credit card numbers. Administrators can instantly alert users of violations and take action downstream, whether by blocking or encrypting messages, to prevent sensitive information from leaking. DLP Assist is lightweight, easy to deploy, and helps organizations maintain compliance without disrupting workflow.

Making DLP more accessible

After speaking with our customers, we discovered a common challenge: many wanted to implement a data loss prevention policy for Outlook, but found existing solutions either too complex to set up or too costly to adopt.

That’s why we created DLP Assist to be a lightweight application that can be installed in minutes. Unlike other solutions, it doesn’t require changes to outbound email connectors or provide concerns about IP reputation to customers. By fully leveraging the Microsoft ecosystem, DLP Assist makes email DLP accessible to all organizations, whether they have dedicated IT teams or none at all.

We also recognized that traditional DLP solutions often demand significant financial investment in not just software Continue reading

Prepping for post-quantum: a beginner’s guide to lattice cryptography

The cryptography that secures the Internet is evolving, and it's time to catch up. This post is a tutorial on lattice cryptography, the paradigm at the heart of the post-quantum (PQ) transition.

Twelve years ago (in 2013), the revelation of mass surveillance in the US kicked off the widespread adoption of TLS for encryption and authentication on the web. This transition was buoyed by the standardization and implementation of new, more efficient public-key cryptography based on elliptic curves. Elliptic curve cryptography was both faster and required less communication than its predecessors, including RSA and Diffie-Hellman over finite fields.

Today's transition to PQ cryptography addresses a looming threat for TLS and beyond: once built, a sufficiently large quantum computer can be used to break all public-key cryptography in use today. And we continue to see advancements in quantum-computer engineering that bring us closer to this threat becoming a reality.

Fortunately, this transition is well underway. The research and standards communities have spent the last several years developing alternatives that resist quantum cryptanalysis. For its part, Cloudflare has contributed to this process and is an early adopter of newly developed schemes. In fact, PQ encryption has been available at our edge since Continue reading

Improving Data Loss Prevention accuracy with AI-powered context analysis

We are excited to announce our latest innovation to Cloudflare’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution: a self-improving AI-powered algorithm that adapts to your organization’s unique traffic patterns to reduce false positives. 

Many customers are plagued by the shapeshifting task of identifying and protecting their sensitive data as it moves within and even outside of their organization. Detecting this data through deterministic means, such as regular expressions, often fails because they cannot identify details that are categorized as personally identifiable information (PII) nor intellectual property (IP). This can generate a high rate of false positives, which contributes to noisy alerts that subsequently may lead to review fatigue. Even more critically, this less than ideal experience can turn users away from relying on our DLP product and result in a reduction in their overall security posture. 

Built into Cloudflare’s DLP Engine, AI enables us to intelligently assess the contents of a document or HTTP request in parallel with a customer’s historical reports to determine context similarity and draw conclusions on data sensitivity with increased accuracy.

In this blog post, we’ll explore DLP AI Context Analysis, its implementation using Workers AI and Vectorize, and future improvements we’re developing. 

Cloudflare is now IRAP assessed at the PROTECTED level, furthering our commitment to the global public sector

We are excited to announce our public sector suite of services for Australia, Cloudflare for Government - Australia, has been assessed under the Infosec Registered Assessor Program (IRAP) at the PROTECTED level in Australia.

IRAP, established by the Australian government, provides a rigorous, standardized approach to security assessment for cloud products and services. Achieving IRAP PROTECTED assessment reinforces our commitment to providing secure, high-performance solutions for government agencies and highly regulated industries across the globe.  

Obtaining our IRAP assessment is one part of our broader strategy to scale out our Cloudflare for Government offering to as many areas of the world as possible. Cloudflare’s global network offers governments and highly regulated customers a unique capability to be within 50ms of 95% of Internet users globally, while also offering robust security for data processing, key management, and metadata storage. Earlier this year, we announced that we completed our ENS certification in Spain, and we are well underway on the development of our FedRAMP High systems in the United States. 

Cloudflare’s network spans more than 330 cities in over 120 countries, where we interconnect with approximately 13,000 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to Continue reading

Why Did SoftBank Just Buy Ampere Computing?

The world is getting stranger, isn’t it? We understand, given the difficulties of selling Arm server chips to hyperscalers and cloud builders that are also designing and manufacturing their own Arm CPUs, why Ampere Computing, the only successful freestanding Arm server CPU supplier to even get its chips into its chosen tech titan customers, would want to be acquired by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. …

Why Did SoftBank Just Buy Ampere Computing? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

A Detailed Look at the Calico Ingress Gateway

Managing traffic in Kubernetes environments presents serious security and operational challenges. Traditional ingress solutions lack flexibility, rely on proprietary configurations, and offer limited traffic control, creating security gaps and inefficiencies.

What’s needed is a more flexible, scalable, and policy-driven approach to ingress traffic management. Enter Calico Ingress Gateway—built to eliminate these limitations while enhancing security, visibility, and control over ingress traffic at scale.

So Why an Ingress Gateway?

An ingress gateway serves as the first point of contact for external traffic entering a Kubernetes cluster. For most modern applications, this traffic includes API requests, user connections, or service calls, all of which need to be routed to the appropriate workloads securely and efficiently. Without a robust ingress solution, organizations face a range of challenges:

  • Customization Challenges: Legacy ingress solutions provide limited flexibility, frequently requiring custom annotations to extend functionality, which increases the time and complexity of implementations.
  • Operational Complexity: Traditional ingress controllers often rely on proprietary configurations, making deployments harder to manage and less portable across environments.
  • Limited Traffic Control: Basic ingress controllers lack some of the advanced features needed to manage, shape, and secure traffic effectively.

What is the Calico Ingress Gateway?

The Calico Ingress Gateway is a 100% Continue reading

N4N018: RIB vs. FIB & Administrative Distance or Route Preference

Ready for more routing and routing protocols? Today we discuss the roles of the network operating system (NOS), routing protocols, the Routing Information Base (RIB), and the Forwarding Information Base (FIB). We also include the dynamics of routing protocols, the importance of hardware like TCAM for performance, and the concept of administrative distance or route... Read more »

Cloudflare named a leader in Web Application Firewall Solutions in 2025 Forrester report

Forrester Research has recognized Cloudflare as a Leader in it's The Forrester Wave™: Web Application Firewall Solutions, Q1 2025 report. This market analysis helps security and risk professionals select the right solution for their needs. According to Forrester: 

“Cloudflare is a strong option for customers that want to manage an easy-to-use, unified web application protection platform that will continue to innovate.”

In this evaluation, Forrester assessed 10 Web Application Firewall (WAF) vendors across 22 criteria, including product security and vision. We believe this recognition is due to our continued investment in our product offering. Get a complimentary copy of the report here.

Since introducing our first WAF in 2013, Cloudflare has transformed it into a robust, enterprise-grade Application Security platform. Our fully integrated suite includes WAF, bot mitigation, API security, client-side protection, and DDoS mitigation, all built on our expansive global network. By leveraging AI and machine learning, we deliver industry-leading security while enhancing application performance through our content delivery and optimization solutions.

According to the Forrester report, “Cloudflare stands out with features that help customers work more efficiently.” Unlike other solutions in the market, Cloudflare’s WAF, API Security, bot detection, client-side security, and DDoS protection are natively Continue reading

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