Best Practices for Securing Generative AI with SASE

As Generative AI revolutionizes businesses everywhere, security and IT leaders find themselves in a tough spot. Executives are mandating speedy adoption of Generative AI tools to drive efficiency and stay abreast of competitors. Meanwhile, IT and Security teams must rapidly develop an AI Security Strategy, even before the organization really understands exactly how it plans to adopt and deploy Generative AI. 

IT and Security teams are no strangers to “building the airplane while it is in flight”. But this moment comes with new and complex security challenges. There is an explosion in new AI capabilities adopted by employees across all business functions — both sanctioned and unsanctioned. AI Agents are ingesting authentication credentials and autonomously interacting with sensitive corporate resources. Sensitive data is being shared with AI tools, even as security and compliance frameworks struggle to keep up.

While it demands strategic thinking from Security and IT leaders, the problem of governing the use of AI internally is far from insurmountable. SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) is a popular cloud-based network architecture that combines networking and security functions into a single, integrated service that provides employees with secure and efficient access to the Internet and to corporate resources, regardless Continue reading

What’s New in Calico – Summer 2025

As Kubernetes adoption scales across enterprise architectures, platform architects face mounting pressure to implement consistent security guardrails across distributed, multi-cluster environments while maintaining operational velocity. Modern infrastructure demands a security architecture that can adapt without introducing complexity or performance penalties. Traditional approaches force architects to cobble together separate solutions for ingress protection, network policies, and application-layer security, creating operational friction and increasing attack surface.

Today, we’re announcing significant enhancements to Calico that eliminate this architectural complexity. This release introduces native Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities integrated directly into Calico’s Ingress Gateway, enabling platform architects to deploy a single technology stack for both ingress management and HTTP-layer threat protection. Combined with enhanced Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) controls, and centralized observability across heterogeneous workloads, platform architects can now design and implement comprehensive security all within a unified platform.

The new features in this release can be grouped under two main categories:

  1. Security at Scale with a Unified Platform: This release introduces critical security features that make it easier to secure and scale Kubernetes workloads.
  2. Simplified Operations for Kubernetes, VM, and bare metal workloads: Reducing complexity is key to scaling Kubernetes, VM, and bare metal workloads, and this release introduces features that make Continue reading

NeuReality Wants Its NR2 To Be Your Arm CPU For AI

Just because the center of gravity for GenAI compute and other kinds of machine learning and data analytics has shifted from the CPU to the XPU accelerator – generally a GPU these days, but not universally – does not mean that the choice of the CPU for the system hosting those XPUs doesn’t matter. …

NeuReality Wants Its NR2 To Be Your Arm CPU For AI was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Unmasking the Unseen: Your Guide to Taming Shadow AI with Cloudflare One

The digital landscape of corporate environments has always been a battleground between efficiency and security. For years, this played out in the form of "Shadow IT" — employees using unsanctioned laptops or cloud services to get their jobs done faster. Security teams became masters at hunting these rogue systems, setting up firewalls and policies to bring order to the chaos.

But the new frontier is different, and arguably far more subtle and dangerous.

Imagine a team of engineers, deep into the development of a groundbreaking new product. They're on a tight deadline, and a junior engineer, trying to optimize his workflow, pastes a snippet of a proprietary algorithm into a popular public AI chatbot, asking it to refactor the code for better performance. The tool quickly returns the revised code, and the engineer, pleased with the result, checks it in. What they don't realize is that their query, and the snippet of code, is now part of the AI service’s training data, or perhaps logged and stored by the provider. Without anyone noticing, a critical piece of the company's intellectual property has just been sent outside the organization's control, a silent and unmonitored data leak.

This isn't a Continue reading

Cloudflare Launching AI Miniseries for Developers (and Everyone Else They Know)

If you’re here on the Cloudflare blog, chances are you already understand AI pretty well. But step outside our circle, and you’ll find a surprising number of people who still don’t know what it really is — or why it matters.

We wanted to come up with a way to make AI intuitive, something you can actually see and touch to get what’s going on. Hands on, not just hand-wavy.

The idea we landed on is simple: nothing comes into the world fully formed. Like us, and like the Internet, AI didn’t show up fully formed. So we asked ourselves: what if we told the story of AI as it learns and grows?

Episode by episode, we’d give it new capabilities, explain how those capabilities work, and explore how they change the way AI interacts with the world. Giving it a voice. Letting it see. Helping it learn. And maybe even letting it imagine the future.

So we made AI Avenue, a show where I (Craig) explore the fun, human, and sometimes surprising sides of AI… with a little help from my co-host Yorick, a robot hand with a knack for comic timing and the occasional eye-roll. Together, we travel, Continue reading

Beyond the ban: A better way to secure generative AI applications

The revolution is already inside your organization, and it's happening at the speed of a keystroke. Every day, employees turn to generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) for help with everything from drafting emails to debugging code. And while using GenAI boosts productivity—a win for the organization—this also creates a significant data security risk: employees may potentially share sensitive information with a third party.

Regardless of this risk, the data is clear: employees already treat these AI tools like a trusted colleague. In fact, one study found that nearly half of all employees surveyed admitted to entering confidential company information into publicly available GenAI tools. Unfortunately, the risk for human error doesn’t stop there. Earlier this year, a new feature in a leading LLM meant to make conversations shareable had a serious unintended consequence: it led to thousands of private chats — including work-related ones — being indexed by Google and other search engines. In both cases, neither example was done with malice. Instead, they were miscalculations on how these tools would be used, and it certainly did not help that organizations did not have the right tools to protect their data. 

While the instinct for many may be to deploy Continue reading

When Switches Flood LLDP Traffic

A networking engineer (let’s call him Joe1) sent me an interesting challenge: they built a data center network with Cisco switches, and the switches flood LLDP packets between servers.

That would be interesting by itself (the whole network would appear as a single hub), but they’re also using DCBX (which is riding in LLDP TLVs), and the DCBX parameters are negotiated between servers (not between servers and adjacent switches), sometimes resulting in NIC resets2.

Read more …

AI Browsers Are Here — My Experience with Perplexity’s Comet

I have been using Perplexity’s Comet browser for the past two weeks, and it has completely changed the way I use browsers 🌐. I’ve been a Chrome user for as long as I can remember, but after trying out Comet for two weeks, I finally made it my default browser ✅. Comet functions not just … Continue reading AI Browsers Are Here — My Experience with Perplexity’s Comet →

Welcome to AI Week 2025

We are witnessing in real time as AI fundamentally changes how people work across every industry. Customer support agents can respond to ten times the tickets. Software engineers are reviewers of AI generated code instead of spending hours pounding out boiler plate code. Salespeople can get back to focusing on building relationships instead of tedious follow up and administration. 

This technology feels magical, and Cloudflare is committed to helping companies build world class AI-driven experiences for their employees and customers.

There is a but, however. Any time a brand new technology with such widespread appeal emerges, the technology often outpaces the tools in place to govern, secure and control the technology. We're already starting to see stories of vibe coded apps leaking all their users' details. LLM chats that were intended to only be shared between colleagues, are actually out on the web, being indexed by search engines for all the world to see. AI Agents are being given the keys to the application kingdom, enabling them to work autonomously across an organization — but without proper tracking and control. And then there’s the risk of a well-meaning employee uploading confidential company or customer data into an LLM, which Continue reading

Netlab – The Fastest Way to Build Network Labs

Netlab - The Fastest Way to Build Network Labs

Recently, I was doing some reading on MPLS and wanted to build a lab for it. For my use case, I needed five routers connected and running OSPF between them before I could even start configuring MPLS. So before doing any MPLS work, I have to spend a lot of time setting up the lab and prerequisites like configuring IP addresses on interfaces and setting up OSPF. This is tedious, and this is exactly where Netlab can help you get up to speed.

Netlab is an open source tool that makes it easy to build and share network labs. Instead of manually dragging devices in a GUI or typing the same base configs over and over, you describe your lab in a simple YAML file. Netlab then takes care of creating the topology, assigning IP addresses, configuring routing protocols, and even pushing custom configs. Netlab works with containerlab (or vagrant) so you can spin up realistic network topologies in minutes and reproduce them anywhere automagically.

Netlab - The Fastest Way to Build Network Labs

Creating Network Labs the Usual Way

As Network Engineers, we often set up labs to help us learn and practice. Most of us use tools like EVE-NG, GNS3, or Cisco CML, where you go into Continue reading

MoQ: Refactoring the Internet’s real-time media stack

For over two decades, we've built real-time communication on the Internet using a patchwork of specialized tools. RTMP gave us ingest. HLS and DASH gave us scale. WebRTC gave us interactivity. Each solved a specific problem for its time, and together they power the global streaming ecosystem we rely on today.

But using them together in 2025 feels like building a modern application with tools from different eras. The seams are starting to show—in complexity, in latency, and in the flexibility needed for the next generation of applications, from sub-second live auctions to massive interactive events. We're often forced to make painful trade-offs between latency, scale, and operational complexity.

Today Cloudflare is launching the first Media over QUIC (MoQ) relay network, running on every Cloudflare server in datacenters in 330+ cities. MoQ is an open protocol being developed at the IETF by engineers from across the industry—not a proprietary Cloudflare technology. MoQ combines the low-latency interactivity of WebRTC, the scalability of HLS/DASH, and the simplicity of a single architecture, all built on a modern transport layer. We're joining Meta, Google, Cisco, and others in building implementations that work seamlessly together, creating a shared foundation for the next generation of real-time Continue reading

Best of the Hedge: Episode 3

From time to time, I like to dive into the archive and find a show that’s worth repeating. Forthwith, Derrick Winkworth and automation.
 
Network automation efforts tend to focus on building and maintaining configurations–but is this the right place to be putting our automation efforts? Derick Winkworth joins Tom Ammon and Russ White at the Hedge for a conversation about what engineers really do, and what this means for automation.
 

 
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ArubaCX Decides When You’re Done Changing a BGP Routing Policy

When I was cleaning the “set BGP MED” integration test, I decided that once a BGP prefix is in the BGP table of the BGP peer, there’s no need for a further wait before checking its MED value. After all:

  • We configure an outbound routing policy to change MED;
  • We execute do clear bgp * soft out at the end of most BGP policy configuration templates1
  • The device under test should thus immediately (re)send the expected BGP prefix with the target MED.

That approach failed miserably with ArubaCX; it was time to investigate the details.

Read more …

Cloudflare incident on August 21, 2025

On August 21, 2025, an influx of traffic directed toward clients hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) us-east-1 facility caused severe congestion on links between Cloudflare and AWS us-east-1. This impacted many users who were connecting to or receiving connections from Cloudflare via servers in AWS us-east-1 in the form of high latency, packet loss, and failures to origins.

Customers with origins in AWS us-east-1 began experiencing impact at 16:27 UTC. The impact was substantially reduced by 19:38 UTC, with intermittent latency increases continuing until 20:18 UTC.

This was a regional problem between Cloudflare and AWS us-east-1, and global Cloudflare services were not affected. The degradation in performance was limited to traffic between Cloudflare and AWS us-east-1. The incident was a result of a surge of traffic from a single customer that overloaded Cloudflare's links with AWS us-east-1. It was a network congestion event, not an attack or a BGP hijack.

We’re very sorry for this incident. In this post, we explain what the failure was, why it occurred, and what we’re doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Background

Cloudflare helps anyone to build, connect, protect, and accelerate their websites on the Internet. Most customers host their Continue reading

How a volunteer-run wildfire site in Portugal stayed online during DDoS attacks

On July 31, 2025, just as Portugal entered the peak of another intense wildfire season, João Pina, also known as Tomahock, received an automated alert from Cloudflare. His volunteer-run project, fogos.pt, now a trusted source of real-time wildfire information for millions across Portugal, was under attack.

One of the several alerts fogos.pt received related to the DDoS attack

What started in 2015 as a late-night side project with friends around a dinner table in Aveiro has grown into a critical public resource. During wildfires, the site is where firefighters, journalists, citizens, and even government agencies go to understand what’s happening on the ground. Over the years, fogos.pt has evolved from parsing PDFs into visual maps to a full-featured app and website with historical data, weather overlays, and more. It’s also part of Project Galileo, Cloudflare’s initiative to protect vulnerable but important public interest sites at no cost.

Wildfires are not just a Portuguese challenge. They are frequent across southern Europe (Spain, Greece, currently also under alert), California, Australia, and in Canada, which in 2023 faced record-setting fires. In all these cases, reliable information can be crucial, sometimes life-saving. Other organizations offering similar public services can Continue reading

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