Hedge 263: NFTs
How do Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, impact value and the future of all things digital? How are they different from–and similar to–blockchain? Jaime Schwarz joins Russ White and Tom Ammon to talk about what NFTs are, how they work, and how they might impact the future.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Nvidia Turns Its AI Eye To The Enterprise
If you are going to be the full-stack, hardware-to-software-to-developer tools leader in the brave new world of AI, as Nvidia most certainly is, then you have to be able to adapt to the myriad environments that the emerging technology is threading itself through. …
Nvidia Turns Its AI Eye To The Enterprise was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
IPB171: IPv6 Basics – Routing
Our ongoing IPv6 Basics series continues with an episode on v6 routing essentials. We start with a comparison of various routing protocols: RIP, OSPF, IS-IS, EGP, and BGP. We look at pros and cons of each, and discuss challenges such as dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 network implementation, memory and resource use with IPv6, and... Read more »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
Simplify allowlist management and lock down origin access with Cloudflare Aegis
Today, we’re taking a deep dive into Aegis, Cloudflare’s origin protection product, to help you understand what the product is, how it works, and how to take full advantage of it for locking down access to your origin. We’re excited to announce the availability of Bring Your Own IPs (BYOIP) for Aegis, a customer-accessible Aegis API, and a gradual rollout for observability of Aegis IP utilization.
If you are new to Cloudflare Aegis, let’s take a step back and understand the product’s purpose and security benefits, process, and how it came to be.
Allowlisting a specific set of IP addresses has long existed as one of the simplest ways of restricting access to a server. This firewall mechanism is a starting state that just about every server supports. As we built Cloudflare’s network, one of the first features that customers requested was the ability to restrict access to their origin, so only Cloudflare could make requests to it. Back then, the most natural way to support this was to tell our customers which IP addresses belong to us, so they could allowlist those in their origin firewall. To that end, we have published our IP Continue reading
Introducing Cloudy, Cloudflare’s AI agent for simplifying complex configurations
It’s a big day here at Cloudflare! Not only is it Security Week, but today marks Cloudflare’s first step into a completely new area of functionality, intended to improve how our users both interact with, and get value from, all of our products.
We’re excited to share a first glance of how we’re embedding AI features into the management of Cloudflare products you know and love. Our first mission? Focus on security and streamline the rule and policy management experience. The goal is to automate away the time-consuming task of manually reviewing and contextualizing Custom Rules in Cloudflare WAF, and Gateway policies in Cloudflare One, so you can instantly understand what each policy does, what gaps they have, and what you need to do to fix them.
Our initial step toward a fully AI-enabled product experience is the introduction of Cloudy, the first version of Cloudflare AI agents, assistant-like functionality designed to help users quickly understand and improve their Cloudflare configurations in multiple areas of the product suite. You’ll start to see Cloudy functionality seamlessly embedded into two Cloudflare products across the dashboard, which we’ll talk about below.
And while the name Cloudy Continue reading
Making Application Security simple with a new unified dashboard experience
Over the years, we have framed our Application Security features against market-defined product groupings such as Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS Mitigation, Bot Management, API Security (API Shield), Client Side Security (Page Shield), and so forth. This has led to unnecessary artificial separation of what is, under the hood, a well-integrated single platform.
This separation, which has sometimes guided implementation decisions that have led to different systems being built for the same purpose, makes it harder for our users to adopt our features and implement a simple effective security posture for their environment.
Today, following user feedback and our drive to constantly innovate and simplify, we are going back to our roots by breaking these artificial product boundaries and revising our dashboard, so it highlights our strengths. The ultimate goal remains: to make it shockingly easy to secure your web assets.
Introducing a new unified Application Security experience.
If you are a Cloudflare Application Security user, log in to the dashboard today and try out the updated dashboard interface. To make the transition easier, you can toggle between old and new interfaces.
Modern applications are built using a variety of technologies. Your app might include a web interface Continue reading
HTTPS-only for Cloudflare APIs: shutting the door on cleartext traffic
Connections made over cleartext HTTP ports risk exposing sensitive information because the data is transmitted unencrypted and can be intercepted by network intermediaries, such as ISPs, Wi-Fi hotspot providers, or malicious actors on the same network. It’s common for servers to either redirect or return a 403 (Forbidden) response to close the HTTP connection and enforce the use of HTTPS by clients. However, by the time this occurs, it may be too late, because sensitive information, such as an API token, may have already been transmitted in cleartext in the initial client request. This data is exposed before the server has a chance to redirect the client or reject the connection.
A better approach is to refuse the underlying cleartext connection by closing the network ports used for plaintext HTTP, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do for our customers.
Today we’re announcing that we’re closing all of the HTTP ports on api.cloudflare.com. We’re also making changes so that api.cloudflare.com can change IP addresses dynamically, in line with on-going efforts to decouple names from IP addresses, and reliably managing addresses in our authoritative DNS. This will enhance the agility and flexibility of our API Continue reading
Routed Interfaces on Layer-3 Switches and Internal VLANs
In the Router Interfaces and Switch Ports blog post, I described why we have switch ports and routed interfaces on layer-3 switches. Another blog post in the same series described the conceptual architecture of a layer-3 switch:
- All interfaces are connected to a VLAN-aware switch
- The switch interfaces could be access or trunk interfaces1.
- Each VLAN in a VLAN-aware switch can be connected to an internal router through a VLAN interface.
However, that’s not how we configure layer-3 switches. There’s a significant gap between the conceptual configuration model and the internal architecture:
Improved support for private applications and reusable access policies with Cloudflare Access
For years, Cloudflare has helped organizations modernize their access to internal resources by delivering identity-aware access controls through our Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) service, Cloudflare Access. Our customers have accelerated their ZTNA implementations for web-based applications in particular, using our intuitive workflows for Access applications tied to public hostnames.
However, given our architecture design, we have primarily handled private network application access (applications tied to private IP addresses or hostnames) through the network firewall component of our Secure Web Gateway (SWG) service, Cloudflare Gateway. We provided a small wrapper from Access to connect the two experiences. While this implementation technically got the job done, there were some clear downsides, and our customers have frequently cited the inconsistency.
Today, we are thrilled to announce that we have redesigned the self-hosted private application administrative experience within Access to match the experience for web-based apps on public hostnames. We are introducing support for private hostname and IP address-defined applications directly within Access, as well as reusable access policies. Together, these updates make ZTNA even easier for our customers to deploy and streamline ongoing policy management.
In order to better understand how this feature improves the overall Continue reading