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CloudFlare Announces Free SSL Support For All Customers
Z80xxc! writes: CloudFlare, a cloud service that sits between websites and the internet to provide a CDN, DDOS and other attack prevention, speed optimization, and other services announced today that SSL will now be supported for all customers, including free customers. This will add SSL support to approximately 2 million previously unprotected websites. Previously SSL was only available to customers paying at least $20/month for a "Pro" plan or higher.
Browsers connect to CloudFlare's servers and receive a certificate provided by CloudFlare. CloudFlare then connects to the website's server to retrieve the content, serving as a sort of reverse proxy. Different security levels allow CloudFlare to connect to the website host using no encryption, a self-signed certificate, or a verified certificate, depending on the administrator's preferences. CloudFlare's servers will use SNI for free accounts, which is unsupported for IE on Windows XP and older, and Android Browser on Android 2.2 and older.
Browsers connect to CloudFlare's servers and receive a certificate provided by CloudFlare. CloudFlare then connects to the website's server to retrieve the content, serving as a sort of reverse proxy. Different security levels allow CloudFlare to connect to the website host using no encryption, a self-signed certificate, or a verified certificate, depending on the administrator's preferences. CloudFlare's servers will use SNI for free accounts, which is unsupported for IE on Windows XP and older, and Android Browser on Android 2.2 and older.
CloudFlare isn't a host, it's a sort of advanced CDN with extra features. You still need to have the website hosted on another server somewhere. Their website explains how it works better than I can, so you might as well read it there: https://www.cloudflare.com/ove...
Could Slashdot start offering free SSL support for all readers?
But if your site is behind a CDN proxy and highly cacheable, then you can probably get away with cheap hosting like WebFaction or something.
That would require Slashdot to switch to an ad network that supports HTTPS, such as Google AdSense. Which others do?
Google announced in August (I believe) that page rank will now include SSL scoring. So if those ad networks want to remain relevant, by not breaking all the pages they want to get published on, then those web devs and admins better step up their game. Let me rephrase that, the ad networks need to budget for, and pay for web devs and admins, or train the ones they have already.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Have some irony:
C:\Users\Guspaz>tracert www.spamhaus.org
Tracing route to cdn-cf.spamhaus.eu [190.93.243.93]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 10 ms 39 ms 14 ms 10.245.x.x
3 11 ms 13 ms 10 ms 10.170.x.x
4 10 ms 8 ms 17 ms xe-0-1-1_0-bdr01-mtl.teksavvy.com [206.248.155.109]
5 16 ms 15 ms 16 ms xe-1-1-0_2210-bdr04-tor.teksavvy.com [192.171.63.161]
6 22 ms 17 ms 23 ms gw-cloudflare.torontointernetxchange.net [206.108.34.208]
7 17 ms 16 ms 15 ms cf-190-93-243-93.cloudflare.com [190.93.243.93]
Trace complete.
A surprising number of sites use CloudFlare. The trouble with CloudFlare is, if you want to stay anonymous on the internet using Tor, you're SOL, as they serve you captchas every 3 pages when they see a connection coming from a Tor exit node.
So essentially, if you're a Tor user, CloudFlare:
- Renders a sizeable portion of the internet unusuable for you
- Makes money on your back by making you solve captcha, and turning you into a human OCR.
CloudFlare and Google (which also serve captchas to Tor users, only fewer exit nodes are concerned) are quickly making Tor unusable, which must make the NSA wet their pants.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Indeed. I run a couple websites that see a decent amount of traffic. CloudFlare up front, Webfaction on the backend. Works quite well overall. Very speedy load times and easy to set up. I'm looking forward to enabling SSL for all my sites. I have had some troubles getting the right IP addresses into logs and applications though... WebFaction's nginx reverse proxy adds an X-FORWARDED-FOR header, which replaces that sent by CloudFlare with the CloudFlare IP... so you end up not getting the right IP returned.
Am I the only one wondering how they get a CA to sign the certificate? Seems like an interesting opportunity for someone within CloudFlare to get their own SSL certs signed, and MITM to their hearts content.
Amazon CloudFront is a lot better than CloudFlare and has supported SSL for years. Plus it's possible to store a website in a S3 bucket, there is no need for a web server. For pennies a month you get an insanely fast website, there is nothing close to it performance-wise. Pricing is around $0.12 per GB of transfer. S3 is about $0.03 per GB of storage per month.
The only complicated thing with a CDN is that since it puts the website in cache, it's more tricky to push updates. Either you wait until the cache expires or pay a small fee to "invalidate" content.
lucm, indeed.
You've got a single company who is encouraging web site operators to direct all traffic through CloudFlare's network. Now we don't need things like 'web bugs' to track you as you browse the internet, CloudFlare has your IP and can watch you as you go from one CloudFlare site to the next. Even if the site uses SSL, it's being decrypted now inside CloudFlare's network where they can watch everything you do.
And the NSA/CIA/etc must love that too. They don't have to subpoena many different web sites, they just subpoena CloudFlare or even work with CloudFlare like they do with AT&T and Verizon, stick an NSA black box on the network just after the connection has been decrypted, and watch everything you're doing while you think you're protected with an SSL connection to the web site you're visiting.
They discuss origin server encryption (the plaintext issue) in a follow-on blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/or...