February 2021 Summaries

Network-layer DDoS attacks are increasing, prompting security teams to reevaluate their L3 DDoS mitigation strategies. To address this issue, Cloudflare has introduced new functionality for its on-demand Magic Transit service called flow-based monitoring. This feature allows the detection of threats and notifications to customers when they are under attack so that they can activate Magic Transit for protection. Magic Transit is a solution offered by Cloudflare to secure and accelerate networks at the IP layer, providing DDoS protection, traffic acceleration, and other network functions delivered as a service from every Cloudflare data center. With its global network and fast time to mitigate attacks, it offers comprehensive protection without compromising performance.

John Graham-Cumming has shared an interesting approach to dividing employees into random groups for virtual hangouts. He initially wrote a Python code to divide n elements into groups of at least size g, minimizing the size of each group. Later, he simplified the solution by using a formula that calculates how many elements should be in each group without looping. The final code is: `groups = [1+max(0,n-(i+1))//(n//g) for i in range(n//g)]`. This approach helps to ensure fair distribution of employees into groups and promotes interaction among them.

Justina Wong, Technical Support Team Lead at Cloudflare Lisbon, shares her experience working at the company and provides insights for those interested in joining their team. She highlights the importance of learning from talented colleagues and being part of a unified company culture that values helpfulness and problem-solving. With remote work becoming the norm, Justina notes how communication among teams has improved during the pandemic. Cloudflare is currently hiring aggressively despite the pandemic, with over 25 open positions in Lisbon across various categories such as Security Engineers, Full-Stack Developers, Data Scientists, and more.

The Managed Rules team at Cloudflare has implemented a feature allowing Enterprise users to debug Firewall Rules by viewing the part of a request that matched the rule, while ensuring secure storage of debugging data. They chose Hybrid Public Key Encryption (HPKE) for its combination of symmetric and public-key cryptography, aiming to provide a single, future-proof, robust, interoperable solution. HPKE is an emerging standard developed by the Crypto Forum Research Group (CFRG), with a high level of security in a generic manner and necessary hooks to tie messages to their context. The team implemented HPKE in Rust due to its native primitives and ability to compile to WebAssembly, allowing reuse across the edge component that encrypts payloads and the UI and CLI that decrypt them.

Cloudflare has introduced a fundamental improvement to its Argo Tiered Cache called Smart Tiered Cache Topology. This feature dynamically selects the single best upper tier for each website's origin, reducing the number of times data centers communicate with an origin server and improving load performance for web pages. The new topology also provides tiered cache analytics to monitor cost and performance benefits. Argo Tiered Cache is part of a suite of products that analyze and optimize routing decisions across the global internet in real-time, helping to determine the optimum path from visitor to content at any given moment.

Argo is a tool designed to make the internet faster and more efficient by observing network conditions and finding optimal routes across the internet. One of its features, Tiered Cache, reduces the number of data centers responsible for requesting assets from the origin server. Today, Cloudflare introduces Smart Topology, which maximizes cache hit ratios by identifying the single best data center for making requests to the origin. This feature is built on Argo's internal infrastructure and automatically configures itself once enabled by the customer. The topology selection algorithm minimizes cache misses and latency by choosing a proxying data center close to the origin server, ensuring network efficiency.

The 2020 U.S. elections validated the importance of having access to authoritative sources of election information, with robust cybersecurity preparations appearing successful. Cloudflare's Athenian Project and Project Galileo provided free security services to state and local election websites, political campaigns, and organizations promoting accurate voting information. The company protected over 1,400 organizations worldwide under these projects. Cybersecurity threats against election-related entities increased during the elections, with the Cloudflare WAF blocking more than 10 million attacks in 2020. Lessons learned from preparing for the 2020 U.S. election include the need to be flexible and adaptable, as well as the importance of working with a range of players involved in promoting trust in the electoral process. Cloudflare plans to continue its work to protect resources in the voting process and help build trust in democratic institutions.

Cloudflare has announced its inaugural set of Partner Awards, recognizing companies worldwide that have demonstrated exceptional performance in acquiring technical expertise in their offerings, delivering innovative applications and services built on Cloudflare, and ensuring customer success. The awards cover three regions - Americas, APAC, and EMEA - with winners including Rackspace Technology as Worldwide MSP Partner of the Year, Optiv Security as Americas Partner of the Year, Pacific Tech Pte Ltd as Services Partner of the Year in APAC, and Safenames as EMEA Partner of the Year. The awards also honor individual achievements such as Most Valuable Players and Partner Systems Engineers of the Year.

The blog analyzes real-time internet statistics during Super Bowl LV, focusing on advertisers' website traffic, social media activity in the US, food delivery services, and American football websites. It reveals that commercials do drive significant traffic to companies' websites during the game. Notable spikes were observed for vehicle manufacturers like General Motors, Cadillac, and Jeep; food and drink brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Bud Light, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, Doritos, Oatly, Jimmy John’s, Dr. Squatch, Microban24, Tide, WeatherTech, Rocket Mortgage, Klarna, Paramount+, Skechers, and Fiverr; and healthcare product company Dexcom and space exploration project Inspiration4. The blog concludes that Dexcom had the highest commercial-induced peak with a 100x boost, followed by Inspiration4 with over 70x traffic increase.

The text discusses the issue of unexpectedly high memory consumption in a distributed configuration system called Quicksilver after migrating its storage engine to RocksDB. It explains that the root cause was the default memory allocator, glibc malloc, which led to significant memory fragmentation and waste due to its design for multithreaded applications. The solution was switching to TCMalloc, a memory allocator designed specifically for multithreading, which improved service memory consumption by almost three times. The post emphasizes the importance of choosing an appropriate memory allocator based on workload requirements to optimize memory usage in long-running applications with multiple threads.