this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Oh, okay, so I'm not wrong that they're good right now.
I'm a little unclear on how it works. Do they strip off HTTPS somehow? Otherwise, there's not too much unencrypted traffic around anymore.
Well yes, how else they can provide their services such as page caching, image optimizing, email address obfuscation, js minifications, ddos mitigation, etc unless they can see all data flowing between your server and your visitors in the clear?
Cloudflare is basically an MITM proxy. This blog post might be helpful if you want to know how mitm proxy works in general: https://vinodpattanshetti49.medium.com/how-the-mitm-proxy-works-8a329cc53fb
Jesus Christ, I didn't realise.
One of the services they provide is free SSL certificates. As part of that, they have the private key to decrypt the traffic. They aren’t trying to hide that— this is true of any service that hosts the SSL cert for your site.
Does that mean it wouldn't be an issue if you bring an SSL cert from say ZeroSSL but use Cloudflare for DNS, caching, DDoS protection etc?
For DNS and DDoS protection that wouldn't directly be an issue.
For caching it would be breaking. You cannot cache what you cannot read (encrypted traffic can only be cached by the decrypting party).
It’s not who issues the cert that matters, it is who hosts it. Hosting it includes having the private key. You always have to trust your website host, full stop.
Man, I thought we were done with this shit when HTTPS became standard.
With what? HTTPS has to terminate the encryption somewhere and that place has to have the private key to do so.
CloudFlare is providing the same service here as all other hosts of HTTPS websites do.
Well, depends. If it's hosted on AWS and HTTPS terminates there like it's supposed to, Amazon could look inside, but a human being would have to personally hack your container and extract the data, so that's a bit better. If it's something more like Wix, though, sure. (Is Wix still a thing?)
If you use the AWS load balancer product or their certificates, they have access to the private key, regardless of whether you forward traffic from the LB to the container over HTTPS or not.
If you terminate the SSL with your own certificate yourself, Amazon still installs the SSM agent by default on Linux boxes. That runs as root and they control it.
If you disable the SSM agent and terminate SSL within Linux boxes you control at AWS, then I don’t think they can access inside your host as long as you are using encrypted EBS volumes encrypted with your key.
Obviously, I've never actually done this. Good to know.
I'm starting to worry that HTTPS is entirely fake - in the sense that it's purely decorative encryption that protects an insignificant part of the transaction. Like, maybe by design. The NSA's been doing something all these years.
HTTPS is real and tested.
When used as intended, yes. What I mean is that in practice it may have been weakened, by promotion of services that use it in ways far from best security practices.
You have no proof that they're "good right now". The big five corporations were forwarding data to the NSA for years before the surveillance leaks exposed them.
Your privacy default should not be to trust an MITM, ever.