October 2021 Summaries

Forrester's New Wave for Edge Development Platforms has named Cloudflare a leader, recognizing its strong compute, data services, and web development capabilities. Since 2017, Cloudflare has enabled developers to deploy their applications to the edge itself through Workers. The platform aims to reimagine web development by abstracting away scalability, speed, and security concerns, allowing developers to focus solely on application building. Forrester's report highlights Cloudflare's intuitive developer experience, fast global deployment of updated code, minimal cold start times, and differentiated ratings in various criteria such as developer experience, programming model, platform execution model, "Day 2+", integrations, roadmap, vision, and market approach.

Cloudflare Pages now natively supports custom headers on your projects. This feature allows developers to set custom headers for various use cases, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), security configurations, and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). Custom headers can be defined in a _headers file within the build directory of a project. The new engine built to support these custom headers also enhances redirects configuration with splats, placeholders, and status codes.

Technical writer Alice Bracchi shares her experience using Cloudflare Tunnel to share visual content with stakeholders during the documentation process. The tool provides a secure way for local resources to connect to the Cloudflare network without exposing them to outside interference. By setting up personal tunnels, technical writers can expose their local environments to the edge and share URLs with team members for real-time feedback. This approach has improved collaboration within the team and made it easier to visualize changes in context. The team plans to explore additional features such as capturing integrated feedback directly at shared URLs and using Cloudflare Pages for faster deployment processes.

On October 25, Sudan experienced a complete shutdown of its internet access following political turmoil involving military forces detaining senior government officials and dissolving the transitional government. This disruption was confirmed by several media outlets. Cloudflare Radar data revealed that internet traffic in Sudan dropped abruptly on Monday morning and continued to decline throughout the afternoon, with no signs of restoration at 18:00 local time. The shutdown affected all major ISPs from Sudan and impacted both mobile and desktop traffic.

Cloudflare has announced the general availability of its Cloudflare for SaaS product, which aims to provide fast load times, unparalleled redundancy, and strong security to software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. The platform helps developers focus on building their solutions by handling tasks such as setting up an origin server, encrypting customer traffic, keeping customers online, boosting the performance of global customers, supporting vanity domains, protecting against attacks and bots, and scaling for growth. Pricing is made flexible for developers with a pay-per-use model based on Custom Hostnames, which cost $2 per month each. The platform has been used by various projects during its beta phase, including mmm.page, Lightfunnels, and Ventrata.

The adoption of Zero Trust security framework has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as businesses worldwide have shifted to remote work. A survey conducted in five countries - Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore - found that 54% of organizations reported an increase in security incidents in 2021 compared to the previous year. The Zero Trust model focuses on not distinguishing between external and internal access environments and never trusting users or roles. It provides visibility into what is being accessed and applies controls based on behavioral analysis. Key drivers for adopting Zero Trust include increased remote work, security breaches, and a need to improve user experience. However, challenges in implementing Zero Trust include lack of funding, complexity of access technologies, and shortage of IT and security staff.

Cloudflare has introduced Traffic Sequence, a new feature that provides a high-level overview of how its products interact with each other in handling HTTP requests. This feature aims to address the increasing complexity of Cloudflare's product offerings and help users understand which products will see the impact of changes made within their zone. Traffic Sequence is now enabled by default for all zones, appearing on ten product pages within the dashboard. The visualization can be hidden easily by clicking on the "hide" button, and it will be updated automatically when new products are added or updates to existing products modify the traffic order.

Sudarsan Reddy, a developer working on Cloudflare Tunnel, recently experienced an interesting connectivity issue while trying to get the service to connect using UDP protocol QUIC. The problem was unique to UDP and required debugging beyond firewalls. The solution involved setting the source address explicitly in the application to avoid relying on kernel heuristics. This was achieved by using recvmsg and sendmsg system calls, which allow passing additional out-of-band data including source addresses. A minor bug in the library used for this task was also discovered and fixed. The updated version of Cloudflare Tunnel now supports UDP (QUIC) connectivity to the Cloudflare network from anywhere in the world.

Cloudflare Workers is a serverless platform that runs code in 250+ cities worldwide, with a policy that changes to the Workers Runtime must never break an application live in production. This policy differs from traditional server platforms where developers maintain their own stack and decide when to upgrade. In the case of Cloudflare Workers, developers have no control over runtime upgrades, making it crucial for these updates to never break anything. However, sometimes fixes are needed that could potentially break applications. To address this issue, Cloudflare introduced "compatibility dates" where developers can opt into backwards-incompatible fixes by setting a compatibility date. This allows the platform to maintain strict compatibility while still allowing necessary changes and improvements.

Cloudflare Tunnel is a secure way for teams to connect their infrastructure to Cloudflare without opening firewall holes. Today, users can manage and monitor their tunnels through an interactive dashboard in the Cloudflare for Teams Dashboard. The new onboarding guide provides pathways for MacOS, Windows, and Linux users to set up their first tunnel easily. Key metrics such as Status and Uptime are included in the interface, allowing users to manage their tunnels effectively. In the future, more analytics will be incorporated into the dashboard, and improvements will be made to the onboarding experience for new users.

Cloudflare has announced updates to its Crawler Hints initiative, which aims to improve the efficiency of approximately 45% of internet traffic generated by web crawlers and bots. The service now supports IndexNow, a new protocol developed by Microsoft and Yandex that allows websites to notify search engines when content is created, updated, or deleted. Additionally, Crawler Hints is now generally available for all Cloudflare customers at no cost. By enabling Crawler Hints, users can benefit from more efficient crawls with a single button click in the Cache Tab of the Dashboard.

Cloudflare has launched a new Technology Partner Program aimed at creating innovative integrations that benefit its customers, technology partners, and the company itself. The program offers three key areas of support: Build with Cloudflare, Market with Cloudflare, and Sell with Cloudflare. It includes two types of partners - strategic partners who have mature integrations across the Cloudflare product suite, and integration partners who are early participants in the partnership ecosystem. The goal is to expand the Cloudflare Partner Network and make it seamless for customers to use Cloudflare alongside other parts of their technology stack.

Cloudflare has started hiring for its Summer 2022 internship program and opened many roles on their careers website, with applications being reviewed on a rolling basis. They are looking for interns in Software Engineering, Product Management, Research, Data Science, and more. The company is also hosting virtual events and tech talks throughout October and November to engage prospective students. Cloudflare participated in the virtual Grace Hopper Celebration 2021 and plans to have its largest intern class ever this upcoming summer. They offer internships for MBA and J.D. students, as well as non-technical majors.

Cloudflare's Geo Key Manager service allows customers to choose where they store their TLS certificate private keys. The system started as a research project using Keyless SSL and identity-based encryption, but faced scalability issues due to increased demand for geographical control of information. A trans-pacific voyage incident in Melbourne revealed that the head of line blocking caused by sequential processing of requests led to TLS timeouts and degradation for unrelated zones. The solution involved changing keynotto's internal task handling model to process each request concurrently, using a multi-producer, single-consumer queue. Another incident in a Midwest data center highlighted the need for better visibility into system performance and load testing of less common use cases. Cloudflare is now working on overhauling Geo Key Manager to make it more flexible and scalable.

Cloudflare has introduced multi-user IP address detection to improve its security tools and reduce false positives for customers. The company aims to help businesses distinguish between traffic from legitimate users and potentially malicious ones, as relying solely on IP addresses can lead to mistakenly blocking or challenging site visitors. Multi-user IP addresses take various forms, such as enterprise VPNs, proxies, NAT, and CG-NAT systems. Cloudflare's detection tool identifies these situations by analyzing parameters like source ports and user agents. The integration of this feature into products like Bot Management and Rate Limiting is expected to reduce false positive bot detections involving multi-user IP addresses and decrease the likelihood of legitimate users being blocked or challenged.

Cloudflare, a content delivery network (CDN) provider, has developed a method to measure and predict the performance of its network and other CDNs without relying on active probes. The technique involves using passive RTT measurements from Cloudflare's own infrastructure to estimate latency between clients and other CDNs. This approach allows for understanding latency to locations where CDNs have deployed their infrastructure, as well as showing performance improvements in locations where one CDN exists but others do not. The methodology has been validated through a large-scale traceroute and ping measurement campaign, with results indicating that Cloudflare exhibits the lowest median RTT across all observed clients.

IP addressing stifles innovation in network- and web-oriented services due to the need for architectural changes and planning for migration. The traditional approach of binding IP addresses to names and resources creates limitations on content hosting, distribution, and service providers. Addressing Agility is an innovative solution that decouples IP addresses from names and processes, allowing any address to be used to reach a name as long as it's reachable at an address. This approach enables new systems and architectures, such as DNS-based load balancing and policy-based randomized addresses. Cloudflare has been working with Addressing Agility live at the edge since June 2020, serving over 20 million hostnames and services from a single IP address.

Researchers from Cornell Tech and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a next-generation, privacy-preserving compromised credential checking protocol called MIGP (Might I Get Pwned). The protocol allows clients to check for leaked credentials without revealing any information about their queried passwords or usernames. Unlike existing services that only alert users if their exact password is present in a data breach, MIGP also checks for similar passwords that have been exposed. This approach helps detect credential tweaking attacks, an advanced version of credential stuffing. Cloudflare has implemented and deployed the protocol within its infrastructure and open-sourced it under the BSD-3 License.

Cloudflare Research is exploring how to minimize password exposure and thwart password attacks, particularly credential stuffing attacks. These occur when attackers test breached credentials against multiple online login systems in an attempt to hijack user accounts. The blog post discusses two different approaches: hardening password systems using cryptographically secure keys (PAKEs) and detecting the reuse of compromised credentials. Cloudflare has recently rolled out Exposed Credential Checks feature on the Web Application Firewall (WAF), which can alert the origin if a user’s login credentials have appeared in a recent breach. The company is also analyzing data logged by this feature to find patterns of different types of credential stuffing attacks that can be generalized to form attack fingerprints.

The text discusses the complexity of the internet's infrastructure and how it relies on numerous protocols to function. It highlights four crucial properties - performance, security, privacy, and availability - that are essential for a better internet experience. The author then delves into Cloudflare's role in improving these aspects through its work with various protocols such as DNS-over-HTTPS, QUIC, TLS Encrypted Client Hello, Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS, and MASQUE. The text also emphasizes the importance of open standards for building a better internet and encourages readers to participate in the IETF's working groups and mailing lists.

The text discusses the release of an updated version of CIRCL, an open-source cryptographic library written in Go. This new version includes additional packages for elliptic curve-based cryptography (ECC), pairing-based cryptography, and quantum-resistant algorithms. It also provides a detailed overview of pairing-based cryptography, its applications, and the mathematics behind it. The author explains how pairings are used in various cryptographic protocols such as identity-based encryption, short signature schemes, zk-SNARKS, and more. Furthermore, the text delves into the implementation details of CIRCL's pairing functionality, including formally verified arithmetic using fiat-crypto, tower field arithmetic, optimizations for the Miller loop and final exponentiation, product of pairings, subgroup membership testing, and hash to curve algorithms. The author encourages readers to use their updated library and provides a link for more information on CIRCL's other available primitives.

The blog post discusses a new extension to TLS called Exported Authenticators (EAs), which is aimed at improving authentication possibilities and reducing the need for multiple TLS handshakes. EAs allow for application layer authentication that's as strong as TLS authentication, while also tying it to the TLS channel. The design of EAs follows closely to the design of TLS 1.3, which has undergone multiple rounds of formal analysis and consensus from the TLS Working Group at the IETF. Formal analysis is a technique that creates a mathematical description of the protocol, security properties, and model attacker, providing strong assurances that no major issues have been overlooked. Once EAs become an RFC, it will unlock new possibilities such as OPAQUE-EAs for password-based login on the web without revealing the password to the server.

Web pages often contain numerous embedded subresources, such as JavaScript, CSS, and image files, which can significantly impact page load times due to additional DNS lookups, TCP connections, and TLS handshakes. Connection Coalescing, or Connection Reuse, is a technique that allows reusing a TLS connection across different domains, potentially improving users' experience by reducing extraneous requests on page loads and optimizing resource utilization. This study investigated the feasibility of Connection Coalescing in real-world traffic, focusing on privacy and performance benefits. Results showed that approximately 50% of requests to cdnjs from experiment group sites were coalesced, with Chrome creating about 78% fewer TLS connections compared to the control group. Firefox created roughly 22% fewer connections. Overall, connection coalescing demonstrated potential privacy and performance benefits without causing harm to users' experience on the Internet. Future directions include exploring more aggressive connection reuse methods and evaluating support among different browser vendors.

Cloudflare Workers has been designed with protection against side channel attacks in mind, including Spectre. The team at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) partnered with Cloudflare to study the impact of Spectre on their environment and developed a new defense mechanism called Dynamic Process Isolation. This defense uses hardware performance counters to detect Workers whose performance characteristics could be indicative of an attack, moving them into separate operating system processes for additional protection. The research also demonstrated that even with this enhanced defense, there is still room for improvement in combating Spectre attacks.

In 2014, Cloudflare introduced Universal SSL to make HTTPS availability for any internet property easy and free. Since then, encryption has become an essential part of the modern internet. To further enhance security, Cloudflare has launched SSL/TLS Recommender, a tool that guides users to stronger configurations for backend connections from Cloudflare to origin servers. The tool is designed to ensure maximum possible security without compromising website functionality and performance. It performs various checks based on the site's currently configured SSL/TLS option to determine if an upgrade is possible.

Cloudflare has begun its initial deployment of TLS Encrypted ClientHello (ECH), an extension designed to protect sensitive metadata during connection establishment. ECH encrypts the ClientHello message, which includes parameters such as the service name, making it unintelligible to network attackers. The protocol is similar to DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) but has a closed set of authorized domains, preventing domain fronting. ECH aims to improve connection privacy and security on the Internet by encrypting names in DNS and TLS while addressing various potential attack vectors. Cloudflare plans to expand the deployment of ECH slowly, monitoring for failures and working with other stakeholders to find a feasible deployment model that ensures user privacy without hindering network functionality.

Privacy Pass is an extension that helps users prove they are human without enabling tracking. It was first released in November 2017, allowing users to get tokens when solving a Cloudflare CAPTCHA and redeem them for other CAPTCHAs. In October 2019, the Privacy Pass Extension v2.0 added support for hCaptcha CAPTCHAs on any website. The latest version, Privacy Pass Extension v3.0, refactored the browser extension to improve maintainability and flexibility. It also introduced support for future service providers by using programmable modules instead of a configuration file. Additionally, the protocol was proposed as an Internet draft at IETF to ensure standard interoperability.

Cloudflare, a company focused on building collaborations with academia, has introduced a Visiting Researcher program aimed at fostering shared motivation and engagement between the industry and academic researchers. The program is open to postdocs and full-time faculty members who have a PhD and a well-established research track record in areas such as applied cryptography, privacy, network protocols, architecture, measurement, performance evaluation, and distributed systems. Successful expressions of interest should aim at wide dissemination and have the potential to deliver value to both technical and academic communities. The program is designed to support the operationalization of ideas that emerge in academia and put them to the test in deployable services used worldwide.

Cloudflare Research has launched a website dedicated to sharing its growing library of information and encouraging collaboration with industrial and academic research groups worldwide. The company aims to contribute back to the research and standards communities by establishing and maintaining collaborations. The new site, built without JavaScript or CSS frameworks, focuses on accessibility and standards-based web development choices. It features a range of research projects, resources, publications, and additional pointers related to Cloudflare's work in areas such as network security, privacy, cryptography, authentication, Internet measurements, and distributed systems.

Sudheesh Singanamalla spent his summer of 2020 as an intern at Cloudflare working on the Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH) project. The research aimed to provide privacy to clients making DNS requests using DNS over HTTPS while preventing leakage of client IP information. During his internship, Sudheesh collaborated with various teams within Cloudflare and engaged in academic reading groups and random engineer chats. His work on ODoH was presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2021) where it won the Andreas Pfitzmann best student paper award. The internship experience allowed Sudheesh to leverage his strengths and contribute to a project that aligns with Cloudflare's mission of building a better internet.

Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better internet through ongoing product innovation, strategic decision-making, and challenging existing assumptions about the structure and potential of the internet. The company's research team focuses on five operating principles that guide their approach to applying research in building a better internet: 1) Innovation comes from all places; 2) A question-oriented approach leads to better products; 3) Build the tools today to deal with the issues of tomorrow; 4) Going further together; and 5) From theory to practice at a global scale. The team has worked on various case studies, including password security, SSL/TLS recommender, IP address agility, oblivious DNS, and cryptographic attestation of personhood, which demonstrate the practical application of research in improving internet technology and user experience.

The use of mobile Internet varies greatly across countries, with some regions relying heavily on mobile devices for their online activities while others still favor desktop computers. Countries like Sudan and Yemen have over 80% of their internet traffic coming from mobile devices, whereas places like Vatican City and Estonia see less than 40%. In Europe, Italy and Croatia are among the few countries with more mobile than desktop traffic. The Americas show a mix of mobile usage, with Peru having the least at 36% and Cuba having the most at 70%. In Asia, India leads in mobile internet use with 80%, followed by China and Indonesia.

On September 29, 2021, a path traversal vulnerability (CVE-2021-41773) was discovered in Apache HTTP Server version 2.4.49, which could allow an attacker to compromise the web server via remote code execution or access sensitive files. The issue has been patched with updates to versions 2.4.50 and 2.4.51. Customers using affected versions should update immediately. Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall (WAF) provides additional protection against this vulnerability by enabling rules with specific IDs. The flaw leverages missing path normalization logic, allowing attackers to access any file on the file system accessible by the Apache process. Exploit attempts have been observed since October 5, primarily probing for static file paths.

On October 4th, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced a significant outage that lasted for several hours. This event highlighted the interconnectedness of the internet and its potential vulnerabilities. During this time, Cloudflare's public DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, saw a massive spike in SERVFAIL codes due to its inability to access Facebook's authoritative servers. The incident also led to increased traffic for other sites as users sought alternative platforms for communication and entertainment. Additionally, websites that relied on Facebook scripts experienced slower page load times during the outage. Overall, this event served as a reminder of the importance of resilience and collaboration within the internet industry.

The article discusses the issue of online copyright infringement and intermediary liability, focusing on a recent case involving Cloudflare. It explains how infrastructure service providers like Cloudflare are not well-positioned to solve problems such as online infringement but have set up abuse processes to assist copyright holders in addressing the issue. The article then details a lawsuit against Cloudflare by Mon Cheri Bridals, LLC, which was ultimately rejected by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The court held that merely providing CDN and pass-through security services to the websites did not make Cloudflare responsible for their alleged infringement. The article concludes with a hope that this decision will discourage similar claims in the future, allowing service providers like Cloudflare to focus on providing security and reliability services without being dragged into every dispute between third parties and someone who uses their services.

Cloudflare has made its "Waiting Room" feature generally available to customers on Enterprise plans, making it easier to protect websites against traffic spikes. The company also introduced several new features with user experience in mind, including an alternative queueing method and support for custom web/mobile applications. Additionally, the firm revealed that random queueing is perfect for short-lived scenarios with lots of hype, such as product launches, holiday traffic, special events, and limited-time sales.

Attackers are increasingly targeting VoIP infrastructure worldwide, using off-the-shelf booter services and various attack vectors such as TCP floods, UDP floods, and SIP protocol-specific attacks. Companies can prepare by deploying always-on DDoS mitigation services like Cloudflare Magic Transit, enforcing a positive security model, building custom mitigation strategies, and educating employees on ransom demands. If attacked, companies should not pay the ransom, notify their DDoS protection vendor, local law enforcement, and seek assistance from Cloudflare to protect their networks and maintain service quality.

Cloudflare has introduced a new feature for its Enterprise customers that allows them to test custom uploaded certificates in a staging environment before pushing them to production. This helps prevent potential issues and outages caused by incorrect certificate deployment or pinning. The Staging Certificates section under the SSL/TLS tab in the Cloudflare dashboard enables users to upload new certificates to the staging network, which replicates their production environment but is only accessible through Staging IPs. This feature is currently in Beta and available to Enterprise customers upon request.

The text discusses an experiment conducted by Sung Park to measure the performance impact of Hyper-Threading (simultaneous multithreading) and Turbo Boost (Core performance boost) on AMD-based servers running a specific software stack. The results showed that enabling both features resulted in an 86% improvement in requests per second, while latencies were generally lowered by either or both technologies. In the production environment, with both features enabled, requests per second improved by 136%. However, the baseline was skewed due to imbalance in CPU utilization and only partially reproduced lab results. The experiment also added power data, concluding that AMD's implementation of simultaneous multithreading is power-efficient as it achieves additional requests per second while consuming less power compared to the skewed baseline.

Cloudflare has introduced a new feature in its Cloudflare Access service that allows users to add policies granting temporary access to specific users based on approvals from predefined administrators. This feature aims to provide an additional layer of Zero Trust control for any application, whether it's a popular SaaS tool or self-hosted. The Temporary Authentication feature helps avoid overprovisioning sensitive applications and creates scoped permissions with second approval requirements. It also logs all requests and approvals for regulatory and investigative purposes. To get started with this feature, users can create an Access application in the Teams Dashboard and configure when they want to allow temporary authentication with human approval.

On October 4th, 2021, at around 15:51 UTC, a major outage occurred affecting Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The issue began with a configuration change that affected the entire internal backbone of Facebook, causing its DNS names to stop resolving and infrastructure IPs to become unreachable. This led to the failure of Facebook's DNS, which in turn caused other networks worldwide to be unable to find Facebook's network, rendering it unavailable. The outage was eventually resolved by approximately 21:20 UTC when Facebook reconnected to the global Internet and DNS started working again.

In this text, Jen Taylor discusses how Cloudflare has been able to innovate and release new products quickly during their Birthday Weeks. She attributes this success to three factors: cultivating curiosity in their employees, using their own technology (Workers platform), and having a large and diverse free customer base. Curiosity fuels innovation by challenging the status quo and identifying unnecessary points of friction. The Workers platform provides a single, scalable platform for development, allowing for rapid deployment across Cloudflare's network. Lastly, their free customer base helps test new features and provide valuable insights that drive further innovation. Taylor also mentions that they are hiring in various roles to continue building a better internet.

Cloudflare has improved its network performance by addressing issues in various geographies, such as Brazil, Spain, and Africa. The company has successfully increased its ranking from #2 to #1 in 29 out of the 61 networks where it was previously slower than competitors. These improvements were achieved through rectifying route advertisement, enhancing ingress traffic management, and optimizing upstream selection. Cloudflare continues to work on automating the discovery process of poor network performance and aims to deliver better performance for its customers in future innovation weeks.

Over the past month, multiple Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers have been targeted by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks from entities claiming to be REvil. These multi-vector attacks combined both L7 attacks targeting critical HTTP websites and API endpoints, as well as L3/4 attacks targeting VoIP server infrastructure. In some cases, these attacks resulted in significant impact to the targets’ VoIP services and website/API availability. Cloudflare's network is able to effectively protect and accelerate voice and video infrastructure because of its global reach, sophisticated traffic filtering suite, and unique perspective on attack patterns and threat intelligence.

Web3 is described as the decentralized evolution of the internet where data is liberated from proprietary databases and operates without centralization through blockchain technology's incentive structure. In 2021, Ethereum-like blockchains are handling significant traffic with some improvements needed, while newer alternatives like Solana have entered the space to address scaling issues. Cloudflare is well-suited for empowering developers to build Web3 applications on its reliable network. The company has released an open-source example demonstrating how to deploy, mint, and render NFTs using Cloudflare Workers and Pages. In Web3 applications, the blockchain serves as a database and smart contracts act like controllers in the MVC model. This approach allows developers to build user interfaces without platform lock-in or data ownership issues. The rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has been significant, with NFT projects like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club gaining popularity. Cloudflare's developer platform supports scalable solutions for each step of an NFT project's lifecycle, making it foundational to the future of Web3 applications.

The evolution of the internet has seen significant changes from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. However, decentralization, one of its core tenets, was lost in this transformation. This is where Web3 comes in, aiming to restore decentralization and privacy by leveraging blockchain technology. Web3 is a new paradigm for the internet that focuses on distributed systems rather than centralized ones. It enables data and processing not to be held by a single party, which can be useful for companies to provide resilience or in peer-to-peer networks where data can stay in the hands of participants. Cloudflare is contributing to enabling privacy on the web through various initiatives and operating distributed web gateways that provide an HTTP interface to Web3 protocols like Ethereum and IPFS, making it easier for users and businesses to benefit from Web3.

Cloudflare introduces private beta of its Web3 product suite starting with Ethereum and IPFS gateway. The company aims to make Web3 technologies more accessible for developers by providing a stable, reliable, and resilient method to translate HTTP requests into the correct Web3 functions or protocols. The new gateways will help businesses operating at scale and improve user experience by reducing latency and increasing reliability. Cloudflare's global network provides an advantage in caching content near users, allowing for faster download speeds compared to native IPFS.