January 2020 Summaries

Cloudflare has launched "Built with Workers," a new site designed to inspire developers by showcasing various applications built using Cloudflare Workers. The platform aims to help developers get started with the technology and explore its potential. Many of the projects featured on the site are open-source, allowing users to access their source code directly from GitHub repositories. By sharing these projects, Cloudflare hopes to encourage more developers to build innovative applications using Workers.

Kristian Freeman announced the launch of "Built with Workers," a resource for exploring what developers can create using Cloudflare Workers. The site is built on JAMstack architecture and uses Workers Sites, which enables deploying always up-to-date static builds directly to the edge. Built with Workers showcases various applications developed by users of the platform, encouraging others to build their dream apps on top of Workers. The codebase for the site is open-source on GitHub, allowing developers to explore how it was built and deployed from start to finish.

On Data Privacy Day, Cloudflare highlights its commitment to data privacy across all levels of work. The company believes in empowering individuals and entities with technological tools to reduce the amount of personal data shared online. Some of their privacy-enhancing technologies include Universal SSL, Privacy Pass, ESNI, 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver, DNS over HTTPS (DoH), and 1.1.1.1 Mobile Application with WARP. Cloudflare also emphasizes employee education on privacy principles, integrating privacy-by-design into product development, maintaining internal compliance with privacy regulations, ensuring security as a means to enhance privacy, responding to government requests for information in a privacy-focused manner, and supporting vulnerable entities through Project Galileo. The company continues to evaluate its handling of personal data and looks for ways to minimize the amount shared online.

Cloudflare, which operates CDNJS, has analyzed data from requests made for various versions of popular JavaScript libraries like jQuery and TweenMax over the past 12 months. The analysis reveals that once installed on a site, these libraries rarely get updated. Even after new versions are released, old versions continue to be requested at nearly the same volume as before. This suggests that websites tend to last between two and four years, but their reliance on older JavaScript library versions persists. Cloudflare is interested in finding ways to contribute to a more up-to-date web and invites suggestions from users.

Cloudflare has introduced a new feature, the Access App Launch portal, to help users locate applications protected by Cloudflare Access. The portal serves as a dashboard for all applications secured with Access, allowing end-users to connect to every app behind Access with a single click. Administrators can configure the Access App Launch in three steps through the Cloudflare dashboard. Additionally, the feature helps prevent phishing attacks by instructing users to only navigate to internal applications through the Access App Launch dashboard. The new portal is now available for all Access customers as part of the recent announcement of Cloudflare for Teams.

In 2020, numerous elections are expected in countries such as Peru and Myanmar, with the US Presidential election set for November. Recognizing the importance of maintaining public access to election information, Cloudflare launched the Athenian Project in 2017, providing free cybersecurity services to state and local government entities. However, political parties and candidates worldwide are also frequently targeted by cyberattacks. To address this issue, Cloudflare has introduced "Cloudflare for Campaigns," a suite of services tailored to campaign needs. The initiative aims to make it easier for all political campaigns, particularly those with limited resources, to access cybersecurity services.

Cloudflare is developing the QUIC protocol, a secure and multiplexed transport protocol that aims to perform better than TCP under certain network conditions. The company has built a testing lab focused on protocol analysis only, consisting of dedicated x86 hosts. The lab helps with multiple transport protocol development, debugging, performance comparison between each protocol, finding bottlenecks or errors easily, and more. It also includes test automation and visualization tools for data processing and analysis. Additionally, Cloudflare is testing the new transport protocol on mobile devices to understand real-world performance issues better.

Citrix has issued a warning about a vulnerability in their Application Delivery Controller (ADC) product that could allow attackers to bypass the administrator portal's login page and execute arbitrary code without authentication. No patch is currently available, but Citrix plans to release fixes for certain versions on January 20th and others at the end of the month. In the meantime, customers are advised to mitigate the vulnerability using recommended steps involving commands from an administrator command line interface. Cloudflare can also help secure the login page and resources protected by the ADC through its Access service, which checks each request for identity and permission. This strategy prevents unauthenticated users from making requests to the portal. The suggested mitigation steps involve enforcing new responder policies for the ADC interface that return 403s when certain paths are requested, blocking unauthenticated users from reaching directories behind the authentication flow. Adding Cloudflare Access and the Cloudflare WAF together with Citrix's recommended mitigation commands can provide layers of security while a patch is in development.

This article discusses optimizing QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections), a new internet transport protocol designed to accelerate HTTP traffic. It focuses on measuring throughput of QUIC connections and explores various techniques that help mitigate the disadvantage for UDP, which is used by QUIC. The author presents test results using h2load as the client and NGINX with Cloudflare's open-source QUIC and HTTP/3 module as the server. Techniques discussed include using sendmmsg() instead of sendmsg(), enabling UDP segmentation offloading, and evolving from AFAP (As Fast As Possible) to packet pacing for better network performance. The author also highlights some challenges in integrating these techniques with pacing mechanisms.

This article discusses how to use a combination of WebPageTest and Cloudflare Workers for quick testing of new performance ideas or evaluating the latest performance wisdom. The author explains that setting up another internet-facing server can be time-consuming, but using these two technologies allows for rapid iteration and review of different experiments. Cloudflare Workers is a lightweight JavaScript execution environment that enables developers to modify requests and responses without maintaining infrastructure. It provides an event-based fetch API similar to the Service Worker API in browsers. WebPageTest, on the other hand, can re-point arbitrary origins to a different domain using its overrideHost command. The author demonstrates how to set up a Cloudflare worker and configure WebPageTest to redirect requests through the worker. They also provide examples of basic workers that can modify HTML responses or change request priorities. The potential performance improvements from these techniques are illustrated with filmstrips and waterfalls, showing the effects of loading pages over a single connection and modifying HTTP/2 prioritization. In summary, combining WebPageTest and Cloudflare Workers offers an efficient solution for testing new performance ideas and understanding their impact on website performance.

Cloudflare has purchased Seattle-based startup S2 Systems Corporation, which developed an innovative remote browser isolation solution that is not currently available in the market. This technology aims to make endpoints more secure by creating a gap between users' devices and where web code executes. The majority of endpoint compromises involve web browsers, so this solution can significantly reduce security breaches originating from the web.

Ten years ago, the internet was a place people visited, but today it is an integral part of our daily lives. As we become more dependent on the web for both personal and work purposes, ensuring its speed, reliability, and safety has become paramount. Cloudflare, a company that started to address this issue by protecting infrastructure from attacks, is now expanding its product offerings to ensure people within an organization can access tools they need safely. The new suite of tools, called Cloudflare for Teams, includes two complementary products: Access and Gateway. These products are built atop the existing Cloudflare network, making them fast, reliable, scalable, and secure. With this expansion, Cloudflare aims to help organizations transition from traditional hardware-based security solutions to a more modern, mobile, and cloud-enabled approach.

The text discusses the evolution of corporate security models as businesses moved from private networks to cloud-based applications. It highlights how legacy approaches, such as VPNs and on-premise firewalls, have become inefficient and less secure with the rise of SaaS tools and remote work. The author then introduces Cloudflare for Teams, a new platform that applies Cloudflare's network to make the Internet faster and safer for teams. This platform consists of two products: Cloudflare Access, which replaces corporate VPNs with Cloudflare's network, and Cloudflare Gateway, which secures teams by placing Cloudflare's global network between users and the Internet. The author emphasizes that these products leverage Cloudflare's unique advantages, such as fast security, massive scalability, global presence, ease of use, and better threat intelligence.

Cloudflare, a leading internet security company, has expanded its network by adding seven new data centers across various locations worldwide. These include Chattogram and Dhaka in Bangladesh, Honolulu in Hawaii, Adelaide in Australia, Thimphu in Bhutan, and St George's in Grenada. The expansion increases the security, performance, and reliability of the 20 million internet properties on their network. This marks a significant milestone for Cloudflare as it now has a presence in over 200 cities across more than 90 countries.