September 2015 Summaries

On September 27, 2015, CloudFlare celebrated its fifth anniversary. Since its launch in 2010, the company has successfully stopped 7 trillion cyber attacks and served 99.4 trillion requests. In celebration of their milestone, they hosted an Internet Summit at their San Francisco Headquarters with over 500 attendees. The event featured speakers discussing the future of the internet and concluded with a party featuring live music from Walk Off the Earth.

CloudFlare recently experienced a large-scale HTTP flood attack originating from millions of legitimate-looking HTTP requests issued by real browsers. The attack was unusual as it appeared to be browser-based and targeted one of their customers' servers with over 275,000 HTTP requests per second. The investigation revealed that the malicious script causing the flood was launched through an ad network, likely embedded in mobile apps or websites viewed by users. This type of attack presents a significant threat to internet security as it is difficult for small website operators to defend against such sophisticated attacks. However, CloudFlare's infrastructure can handle these types of floods automatically without affecting their customers' servers.

Apple's iOS 9 update was released on September 16, 2015, and its adoption rate exceeded expectations. Analyzing user agent strings of requests passing through the CloudFlare network revealed a spike in usage immediately after launch and another when Europe woke up. As of September 21st, iOS 9 adoption was around 30-35% relative to iOS 8 on the CloudFlare network. The update also contributed to an increase in IPv6 requests due to its requirement for all iOS apps running on iOS 9.0+.

In this text, Joshua Motta discusses the rapid growth of CloudFlare since its founding in 2009. The company has grown from a team of 37 to over 200 and expanded its network presence to 62 cities across 33 countries. In 2016 alone, they plan to more than double their global presence and increase the size of their network by an order of magnitude. To support this growth, CloudFlare has raised $110 million from investors including Fidelity, Google, Microsoft, Baidu, and Qualcomm. The company is pioneering a shift at the network edge, moving away from hardware appliances in favor of cloud-based services that can accelerate, secure, and ensure the availability of applications with blazing fast speed, absolute elasticity, and an enormous return on investment compared to hardware based solutions. CloudFlare's vision is to become the new control plane for the network edge, and they are looking for feedback and new team members to help achieve this goal.

On September 24th, 2015, Cloudflare held its first-ever Internet Summit in San Francisco. The event brought together policymakers, business executives, cybersecurity experts, and academics from around the world to discuss the future of the internet over the next five years. Topics covered included technology trends shaping businesses today such as cyber security, mobility, and the Internet of Things. Notable speakers included Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Alex Stamos, Matt Grob, Andrew Ng, Nicole Wong, Andy McAfee, Cindy Cohn, Adam Langley, David Brin, Rajiv Pant, Larry Smarr, and Al Gore (via video presentation). The summit aimed to outline the new internet landscape and help prepare for upcoming changes.

On September 16, 2015, Maria Karaivanova announced an update on the integration of CloudFlare's WHMCS plugin. The plugin allows hosting providers and registrars to extend all the benefits of CloudFlare directly to their customers, including a global CDN with 62 points of presence, automatic web content optimization, basic DDoS protection, reputation-based threat protection, and more. This integration streamlines the process for users by offering a one-click solution via WHMCS. Additionally, partners can offer free SSL encryption to all customers through CloudFlare's Universal SSL offering. To integrate CloudFlare into their WHMCS solution, companies need to visit the partners page and obtain an API key.

In 2015, Cloudflare launched its performance and security platform across mainland China after overcoming technical, economic, and regulatory challenges. The company partnered with Baidu, a leading Chinese search engine, to provide access to the global network for millions of websites in China. This partnership allowed for significant improvements in website availability and page load times within the country. Additionally, Cloudflare ensured that customer data remained secure and private by implementing strict measures and not sharing any information with governments or other entities.

Kuala Lumpur has joined the CloudFlare network as its 45th global point of presence (PoP), expanding its presence in the Asia-Pacific region to nine PoPs. The addition of Kuala Lumpur helps address difficulties faced by delivering content locally in certain parts of Asia due to some ISPs only connecting with other ISPs within their local Internet ecosystem outside of national borders. This results in slow web experiences for users. Fortunately, the Malaysian government's initiative in 2006 to form MyIX, a neutral internet exchange point (IXP), has facilitated and promoted local interconnection of ISPs, allowing CloudFlare to deliver content both centrally and locally. The result is significantly better load times and application performance for users in Malaysia and CloudFlare's customers.

On September 10, 2015, Cloudflare launched its data center in Berlin, marking it as the company's 3rd in Germany, 14th in Europe, and 44th globally. The new data center is strategically significant due to Berlin being the capital of Germany and the second-largest city in the European Union by population. With this launch, Cloudflare now has a point of presence (PoP) in 7 out of Europe's 10 most populous cities, with plans to achieve a perfect 10-for-10. The company also plans to publish a series of technical blog posts on how they rapidly deploy and manage their expanding global infrastructure footprint.

In August 2015, a small number of users reported experiencing errors while browsing CloudFlare-secured websites using Twitter's in-app browser on iOS devices. The issue was traced to an empty "Referer" header when transitioning from HTTPS to HTTP pages within the app. This behavior contradicts RFC7231, which mandates that a URI reference must be included in the Referer header if present. CloudFlare's Browser Integrity Check flagged this as an error and generated the observed issue. The problem was reported to Twitter and Facebook, leading to a fix allowing for this behavior on their in-app browsers. Developers are advised to be cautious when validating the Referer header, as they may encounter similar issues with other applications.

The text discusses the limitations of the Linux kernel networking stack and how it fails to handle large packet floods efficiently. It mentions various techniques for achieving kernel bypass, including PACKET_MMAP, PF_RING, Snabbswitch, DPDK, and Netmap. However, these techniques require taking over a whole network card, which is not feasible in certain environments like CloudFlare's. The text then explores alternative strategies such as Solarflare's EF_VI, bifurcated drivers, and virtualization approach using Intel 82599 chips. It concludes that while many open source techniques exist, none of them seem to be practical without a dedicated network card.

On September 02, 2015, John Graham-Cumming announced that CloudFlare had switched on a test server to allow users to check the compatibility of their web clients with IPv4/IPv6, HTTP/2, and an SSL certificate using SHA-2 for its signature. The server was intended for testing purposes only and used three key technologies: IPv4/IPv6, HTTP/2, and a SHA-2 based SSL certificate. This test site aimed to provide users with an HTTP/2 endpoint to test their client software compatibility.

In September 2015, George Cagle from Simple Helix shared their experience partnering with CloudFlare for performance improvements and website security for Magento hosting customers. They found that proper implementation of CloudFlare can yield significant speed increases, up to 143% when paired with Railgun™ web optimizer. Additionally, the Web Application Firewall feature enhances security by mitigating threats like botnet attacks and DDoS attacks. Simple Helix has successfully used CloudFlare for unique performance challenges of their customers, resulting in bandwidth savings at the origin server. As a leading hosting provider for Magento e-commerce market, Simple Helix is excited to make CloudFlare a standard part of setup for their customers.