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A CDN doesn't necessarily have to perform a MitM. We really need more nuanced terminology to distinguish the various approaches.
by fc417fc802 3mo ago
A CDN doesn't necessarily have to perform a MitM. We really need more nuanced terminology to distinguish the various approaches.
- gruez 3mo agoRight, but practically speaking all CDNs are MITMs. If you're against cloudflare you should be against cloudfront, akamai, etc. as well.
- inigyou 3mo agoCloudflare is egregiously bad because of its marketing strategy. It tried to get everyone with any small website to use it, by selling a vague notion of security and charging no monetary price, and it worked. They'll even sell you a domain name to increase lockin. Many people recommend getting domains from cloudflare because apparently they're cheap. Akamai, Fastly, etc only take big customers who know what they're doing. You need to sign a proper contract with them. They aren't low-friction.
- edaemon 3mo agoHow would they cache and serve responses without decrypting the traffic?
- sandeepkd 3mo agoIdeally yes, the TLS termination does not need to happen for caching purposes. Challenge is that in practice every business wants to be sticky and try to provide more functionalities which do require TLS termination. Most people either trust CDN's or they do not understand MitM so it does not concerns them. Plus they are getting certificate management and DDOS prevention capabilities.
- inigyou 3mo agoHow can you cache without terminating TLS? Remember, every TLS session uses different encryption keys, so encrypted responses cannot be cached.