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Most Bitcoin websites, Mt. Gox included, are already behind CloudFlare. Worryingly, this means they have surrendered their SSL private keys to a secondary compa

• wladimir 14y ago
  Worryingly, indeed. To me it appears that the "cloud" is the next bastion of centralization and "too big to fail"s. In this case, instead of providing services in a decentralized fashion that makes it hard to attack, they hide behind ever larger and stronger behemoths. In the case of cloudflare there is no great data loss if they disappear, though they could intercept passwords and private data (can you trust them? who has access? what if they are hacked?). But when a service such as gmail (suddenly) disappears... it would be devastating to many people. Much like the failure of a bank.
• gphil 14y ago
  Yeah, but you also already have to trust the certificate authority, your ISP, your employees who have access to the server...the list goes on. Furthermore, I believe the way it works is that clients make an SSL connection to CloudFlare, who makes another SSL connection to your service (using different key pairs.) Granted, they still get to see all your traffic unencrypted, but it all just comes back to trust.
  • lmm 14y ago
    SSL is end-to-end; the ISP is just one more untrusted carrier. And I would expect MtGox to have access controls around employee access to their servers. Both MtGox and their certificate authority have much stronger incentives to play nice than CloudFlare do.
    • ceejayoz 14y ago
      "Hosting provider" probably was meant more than ISP.