Privacy

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The Cloudflare Poison (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by Scolding0513@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Daily reminder that sites "protected" by cloudflare are effectively MITM attacks. HTTPS is now even more worthless. Cloudflare can see everything. this is a known fact and not a theory.

And if you think Cloudflare aren't being tapped by the NSA, you're sadly sadly naive.

All the "privacy respecting" sites use it too. So remember, as soon as you see that cloudflare portal page, you can assume that everything you plug into the site is property of NSA Inc. Trust no one, and do not trust code being served to you over the web if it comes through CF, there is no way to know what they've modified.

Edit: good info link below https://serverfault.com/questions/662946/does-cloudflare-know-the-decrypted-content-when-using-a-https-connection

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[–] SquiffSquiff@lemmy.sdf.org 23 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's not that you're wrong. It's more that I don't understand what you're proposing as an alternative. To add to the comments here pointing out that that's how CDNs work: for many designs of website, the CDN essentially is the website, being served from a cache by the provider. Even when this isn't the case, you would normally have a load balancer in front of whatever was serving your website so that if you need to swap out the server for maintenance upgrade, etc. you don't need to tell who your visitors to go to a different address. In that case, your certificate would be attached to load balancer rather than the server behind it.

If this was a 1990s and I were trying to run my own server on my own hardware in my bedroom, you might have a point, but please explain how you would implement an alternative in any meaningful way today.

[–] myliltoehurts@lemm.ee 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, even if you don't terminate SSL right until your very own app server, it's still based on the assumption that whoever holds the root cert for your certificate is trustworthy.

The thing that has actually scared me with CF is the way their rules work. I am not even sure what's the verification step to get to this, but if there is a configured page rule in a different CF account for your domain that points at cloudflare (I.e. the orange cloud), you essentially can't control your domain as long as it's pointing at CF (I think this sentence is a bit confusing so an alternative explanation: your domain is pointing DNS at your own CF account, in your CF account you have enabled proxying for your domain, some other CF account has a page rule for your domain, that rule is now in control). The rule in some other account will control it.

It has happened to us at work and I had to escalate with their support to get them to remove the rule from the other cloudflare account so we can get back control of our domain while using CF. Their standard response is for you to find and ask the other CF account to remove the rule for your domain.

This is a pretty common issue with gitbook, even the gitbook CEO was surprised CF does this.

[–] SquiffSquiff@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 5 months ago

Thanks. This is pushing the limits of my current understanding, but unless I'm mistaken, this reads like 'anyone who chooses may hijack part of your domain at any time if you both use cloudflare'. Sounds crazy.