Nearly every website today seems to be hosted behind Cloudflare which is really concerning for the future of privacy on the internet.
Cloudflare no doubt logs, stores, and correlates network telemetry that can be used for a wide array of deanonymization attacks. Not only that, but Cloudflare acts as a man-in-the-middle for all encrypted traffic which means that not even TLS will prevent Cloudflare from snooping on you. Their position across the internet also lends them the ability to conduct netflow and traffic correlation attacks.
Even my proposed solution to use archive.org as a proxy is not a valid solution since I found out today that archive.org is also hosted behind Cloudflare… edit: i was wrong
So what options do we even have? What privacy concerns did I miss, and are there any workaround solutions?
I don’t think it’s possible to avoid companies like Cloudflare, AWS, Akamai, etc. Or not without a whole lot of effort that isn’t really reasonable and would severely degrade user experience. They provide what’s become fundamental infrastructure to the internet, and that doesn’t seem likely to change.
It is possible to avoid Cloudflare (the worst offender), proven by instances that are run by more competent experts. For example:
- fedia.io
- sopuli.xyz
- beehaw.org
- infosec.pub
- lemmy.dbzer0.com
- slrpnk.net
- links.hackliberty.org
- lemmy.ml ← used to be Cloudflare-proxied but they got wiser
- mander.xyz
^ Those are good instances where users’ traffic is not recklessly exposed to Cloudflare.
These instances below not only expose their users to Cloudflare, but they’re not even decent enough to inform their own users about it:
- lemmy.world ← Cloudflare
- sh.itjust.works ← Cloudflare
- zerobytes.monster ← Cloudflare
- lemmy.ca ← Cloudflare
- lemm.ee ← Cloudflare
- programming.dev ← Cloudflare
- lemmy.zip ← Cloudflare
If you probe admins of the above list, some will say in effect that they regret pawning all their users to CF but claim they have no choice - that they do not know how to defend from attack. Some admins have no regrets and simply do not give a shit. Many admins are actually ignorant to the extent of not even knowing Cloudflare sees the traffic (yes, many times admins were appalled to learn this from me; who to them is just some random pleb). Probably the most despicable aspect to this is that no Cloudflare admin is socially responsible enough to post a banner msg making sure users are informed about their exposure. If they are proud of their choice and feel they have no choice, then why neglect to disclose it (esp. on a non-profit activity)?
Regardless of their reasons/excuses, it really does not matter to the user. What matters to users is that there are privacy-disrespecting choices and relatively privacy-respecting choices. Obviously street-wise users select from the first list I posted and not the 2nd list.
Only CFd government sites are unavoidable
The only Cloudflare sites that are unavoidable AFAICT are government sites. You can always boycott the private sector, but there are 6 or so states in the US where voter registration goes through Cloudflare. Even if you register on paper, the data entry worker likely goes to the Cloudflare site. I became a non-voter for this reason.
ironically monero.town also uses Cloudflare.
What’s so fundamental about their services?
From a user side, nothing.
From a host side: AWS/GCP/Azure, scaling is built in; maybe isn’t cheaper than self hosting, but it eliminates maintenance worries, uptime is their responsibility.
Cloud front, F5, imperva: protection from: sql injection, basic script attacks, ddos, and man in the middle.
To avoid them you’d have to stick to small time web sites that self host and handle attacks on their own. Funny enough when I ran small-time sites we never had a successful injection attack, and I handled a ddos attack by just blocking IPs one at a time till they gave up. It’s not hard, but when the company hits a certain size where they hire a cyber security specialist, all the sudden we need these additional protection tools.
Thank you. One of the best responses I’ve got so far.
A significant percentage of the internet relies on them. There’s basically no avoiding these companies while using the internet as it now exists.
That’s a circular argument.
“It’s impossible to avoid this these companies because a lot of sites use them.”
Ok. Why?
“Because they provide fundamental services.”
Ok, what’s so fundamental about them?
“A lot of sites use them.”
…ok? WHY?
The service they provide to websites is “better user experience” by acting as a cdn close to the user they get better download speeds and responsiveness. It also is a benefit for the business because they don’t have to worry nearly as much about deploying and maintaining multiple servers around the world.
That is why it’s impossible to avoid these companies, every sane website engineer is going to want the services they offer.
And it’s a service that is easiest to offer when you are an already established large cdn.
Sure, so they’re fundamental to businesses. Not to the internet.
User experience isn’t just for businesses.
User experience?
Wait, I thought we were talking about more than just user experience.
You say “fundamental” when I think (from context) you mean to say “essential”. But to be clear, Cloudflare is not essential to business or the internet. Consider banking in the US. Big banks are competent enough to not need CF. But credit unions are small and on shoestring budgets. So CUs are increasingly exposing all their customers to Cloudflare to save money. If you are a client of a CU that starts using Cloudflare, I suggest switching to paper statements and quit using the website. Switch to a CU that does not expose you to Cloudflare. So far that’s not difficult but that could change.
Thanks! Good tip.
Sure 100% you can build a website without them.
But anyone expecting to serve millions of users is going to use and need them or the user experience will suffer
That’s my point. So it’s not fundamental. Just fundamental for big sites.
And not anyone. Cloudfare and AWS are not the only cloud/CDN services in the world.
But I understand now.
Not sure why people are being so weird about answering your questions, but e.g. CloudFlare does DDoS protection which now basically everything you put on the internet needs some type of , and is far too complicated to do yourself, when you need it.
Thus CloudFlare (or AWS’s equivalent) is pretty essential. I’m sure there are other reasons too.
Thanks. Though I knew all that, I appreciate your response.
I guess DDoS protection is essential, but the fundamental part is dependant on the seevice provider’s goal. If I just want to host a game over the internet for my friends, Cloudflare is not really fundamental for that. For businesses, though, yeah.
Admins tend to have an exaggerated degree of self-importance. They think their own service is somehow so important that downtime is just not an option, even at the cost of pawning all their own users/supporters traffic to a tech giant in a country without privacy safeguards. And they do that even when offering a non-profit service like a fedi instance. It’s a total disregard for privacy even when no money is on the line. Part of the problem is not only are they not hiring experts but they can’t be bothered to develop the competency themselves. They don’t factor in or realize the fact that web security is part of the task they are signing up for. Like someone saying they want to sell fries but they don’t want to be bothered with finding a potato supplier. If they want to reject a fundamental component of the activity, perhaps that activity is not for them.
Sorry, I was assuming that people knew what they did or would look it up themselves. The short and non-technical answer is “the cloud” actually means “other people’s computers” and these companies are the “other people”. The why of it is complicated, there are both technical and economic reasons. I think it probably comes down to efficiency and economies of scale.
Care to elaborate?
So far it seems like it pertains to big sites. So if these cloudfare et al are “impossible to avoid” for any other scanario, I’ll be happy to be schooled.
A quick web search suggests that AWS (Amazon Web Services, I think) hosts 32% of websites. I don’t have more nuance to provide other than to agree that these companies provide architecture to a huge portion of the modern internet. Most of everything is held by a small number of companies, just like wealth is concentrated in a small percentage of the population with huge companies owning most of the market.
AWS is impossible to avoid because there is an incredible amount of stuff on their services. A large portion of websites are hosted there in full or in part. Their various compute services are used by a lot of companies.
AWS is so incredibly big that they are basically “the cloud”. There are of course other providers (Microsoft Azure being the second biggest one) but the developed world would be in chaos if they shutdown overnight.
I am not a huge fan of how big they are, but they are obviously doing a good job.
I can avoid them if I stick to sites that don’t use them.
Cloudflare can be avoided so far but this may not hold up for long. There are browser extensions that put a strikethrough on all links to CF sites. There is also a search service (Ombrelo) which tags and down-ranks Cloudflare sites in the results. There is a bot you can follow on Mastodon that will DM you whenever you share a link to a CF website, so you can remove it (documented here).
What’s your threat model? Adjust accordingly.
The situation is, what it is, but there’s a wide range of actions one can take that fall between the two poles of do nothing and burn all internet enabled devices.
Forget about threat model. It’s becoming increasingly an irrelevant concept, as we reach total globalization and centralisation of all of these global companies.
It’s frustrating, but it could be addressed by the EU members just like how they always have blew up Google so many times on so many occasions by suing them millions of dollars.
It isn’t feasible to avoid using the top few CDNs in the world, of which cloudflare is one. Using a traffic anonymizing service simply kicks the can down the road, and now you need to trust the service you use to obfuscate your identity.
If you use Apple devices, which I’m guessing you don’t, then be aware that cloudflare operates some of Apple’s anonymization nodes. If you rely on TOR to obfuscate who you are, beware that several nations run a LOT of that infrastructure so they can correlate entry and exit information. If you use a paid VPN service, your payment details and account link you directly to the traffic you generate. Do you really trust those services to face government prosecution to protect you?
It’s a hard spot to be in, especially with fewer and fewer companies controlling larger portions of the internet.
Cf only acts as a mitm for encrypted traffic if you choose it in the options. If you provide your own cert then they can’t decrypt anything.
Cf only acts as a mitm for encrypted traffic if you choose it in the options. If you provide your own cert then they can’t decrypt anything.
That’s really misleading. Most admins use Cloudflare’s gratis service and they use CF to handle the traffic load. This is only possible if CF has the private key and sees the traffic. If CF cannot see the traffic, it must pass it all through to the source webserver which defeats the purpose of using CF.
Most importantly, users have no way of knowing whether a web service opts to use their own key or CFs key. It’s impossible. So wise users have no choice but to assume the worst case (which is also the strong majority of cases): that CF sees the traffic.
deleted by creator
Stop using the Internet.
If you’re so concerned about being tracked at those levels you might need to get off for your own mental well being anyways. If you don’t want the benefits of the service (ddos attack protections for major sites, consistent website up time) leave it behind.
If you’re so concerned about being tracked at those levels
What do you mean by “at those levels”? You seem to imply Cloudflare’s abuse is not vastly harmful.
CF ruins Tor, VPNs, discriminates against poor people behind CGNAT, and people who look like bots because they don’t load images. You don’t even get basic protection from IP disclosure. CF sees all traffic on most of their sites, including usernames and unhashed passwords. The OP’s demand is reasonable. The demand that everyone partake in such reckless disclosure to a single gatekeeper running a private walled-garden is not reasonable. Cloudflare has removed the minimum baseline of security that everyone used to have and failed to achieve even a low level of privacy.
Has avoiding Cloudflare become Impossible?
Mostly, yes. But let’s break this down. Cloudflare only breaks web services and so far Cloudflare’s privacy abuses and gate-keeping is mostly confined to the web. Avoiding Cloudflare is impossible in some circumstances.
CFd government sites are unavoidable (voting rights lost in the US)
The only Cloudflare sites that are strictly unavoidable AFAICT are government sites. You can always boycott the private sector, but the public sector is shoved down our throats. There are 6 or so states in the US where voter registration goes through Cloudflare. Even if you register on paper there is still no escape because the data entry worker likely uses the Cloudflare site. I am a non-voter for this reason. Although it’s still possible to move to one of the 44 other states and register there.
CFd medical websites
See How lack of digital rights, Cloudflare, and Google worsened a medical emergency situation and undermined human rights. When you need medical info in a hurry, boycotting is tough.
search is liberated – but only by 1 single search service to date
There is only one general purpose search service that helps avoid Cloudflare: Ombrelo, which tags and down-ranks Cloudflare websites in the results.
Stupid Question:
How do I find out if a website I use is hosted over cloudflare? The noscipt javascript blocker extension shows in some cases I blocked some cloudflare javascript. For example on the lemmy.world instance it shows a script labeled “cloudflareinsights.com” that I block. That apparently provides visitor analytics
According to them on insights:
Our edge sees all requests made to a website, regardless of whether it’s cached or uncached, the user has adblock, or they turned off JavaScript. This enables us to […]
On other sites it shows a “confirm you are human” check-box labeled with the cloudflare brand (if I activate javascript for that site) – according to cloudflare wikipedia that service is known as Cloudflare Turnstile. This is how I currently see if cloudflare is involved.
Another interesting thing I noticed on stackoverflow is email protected which confirms to me stackexchange also uses cloudflare somehow.
I guess you could detect a Reverse Proxy by cloudflare based on its IP-Adress ~ but I do not really know how to look that up perhaps the following stack overflow answer might help using the tools
nslookupandwhois… Any other hints on this?nslookup www.monero.townwhois -h whois.arin.net n <IP-Adress from prev command> | egrep 'Organization'How is Cloudflare able to decrypt TLS traffic?
The long answer is here.
The short answer: Cloudflare holds the TLS keys and terminates the tunnel. The padlock misleads people because they think that means the tunnel goes all the way to the server hosting the source website.
Note as well that you are using lemmy.zip, a Cloudflared instance. CF sees your IP address, username, password (unhashed) and everything you do. (edit: See this comment for alternatives).
Well, I’m surprised I didn’t know this. Or that this isn’t talked more about.
Or that this isn’t talked more about.
Indeed. It’s disturbing how not even EFF (the org most reputable for educating people about privacy among other digital rights) keeps Cloudflare’s attack on the privacy of 20%+ web traffic out of the spotlight that it should have.
Virtually every CDN provider does this. Akamai does, AWS does, etc. it’s just a part of how these sorts of things work.
Even my proposed solution to use archive.org as a proxy is not a valid solution since I found out today that archive.org is also hosted behind Cloudflare…
Yikes! Can you give more detail? I’ve used archive.org quite heavily for years (it’s the only practical universal escape from Cloudflare). The IP address is not in Cloudflare’s range. But recently Cloudflare as started hiding its own presence by outsourcing to 3rd parties. It’s a vast minority of cases but this could obviously worsen. Is archive.org using CF through one of the undisclosed 3rd parties? A couple years ago archive.org announced a disturbing partnership with CF but did not disclose the details.
Upon further investigation, I mistook original cloudflare headers that were passed through with x-archive-orig-* as an indication that archive.org was behind cloudflare. my mistake. I have edited the original post.
VPN. Tor. Those are basic tools for relative anonymity.
You might be interested in encrypted DNS. Here’s a couple few good resources on that.
https://www.howtogeek.com/874773/the-best-dns-servers-for-secure-browsing/
They aren’t asking about DNS, they’re talking about cloudflare being a cdn. Encrypted DNS doesn’t change anything in this situation.
How so?
How so what? Connecting to cloudflare as a CDN has nothing to do with DNS since it’s HTTP(s).
