15 ms·

Universal SSL

712 points by benjojo12 12y ago

pdkl95 12y ago
First, let me say that the aggressive approach to actually making encryption happen that CloudFlare has been pushing recently is very commendable. The hard part about finally retiring the old plaintext protocols we currently are stuck with is critical mass - nobody sees the point when plaintext seems to "work just fine". The various steps CloudFlare has taken to encourage SSL will go a long way towards reversing that attitude. That said, I worry about the future we are creating by entrusting so much security and traffic to a single point of failure.[1] It seems to me that CloudFlare is positioning themselves as another Google or Facebook, where a key feature of their business is that they get to track the web history of a large portion of internet users. Much like Google gets to have a lot of my email when other party is @gmail.com, CloudFlare gets click histories by people using their CDN and caching/filtering servers. While I don't really know anything about the motives and personalities behind the company, I can give them the benefit of the doubt for now. Unfortunately, their motives don't matter - in a world where "national security letters" Prism, XKeyscore, and the like exist, CloudFlare's motives may not matter. Even more concerning is that while it my hard to avoid Google's tracking, it is at least theoretically possible. With CloudFlare (or any similar service) we are stuck with a situation similar to tinyurl/t.co/bit.ly [2] where content is hidden behind serves from which you have to request the real URL (or in this case, the content itself). Don't get me wrong - SSL becoming significantly more common is good regardless of what else is going on, and CloudFlare still deserves a lot of praise for advancing a problem that has been so resistant to progress in the past. I would even agree that CloudFlare's caching services and security protections are (very) good engineering techniques that we should be using. It just seems like everybody is (yet again) setting up a single point of failure that will suddenly have very significant consequences the minute somebody with real power decides they want those very-revealing server logs. [1] I'd be the first to admit I don't have the best understanding of how CloudFlare works; corrections to any misunderstandings I may have about their business or tech would be greatly appreciated. [2] http://preview.tinyurl.com/feckless-imbroglio http://preview.tinyurl.com/feckless-imbroglio
- jgrahamc 12y ago
  It seems to me that CloudFlare is positioning themselves as another Google or Facebook, where a key feature of their business is that they get to track the web history of a large portion of internet users. CloudFlare's business model is not offering a free service and figure out how to make money. It's getting people to pay us money and those people are our actual customers who run web sites: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans https://www.cloudflare.com/plans Unfortunately, their motives don't matter - in a world where "national security letters" Prism, XKeyscore, and the like exist, CloudFlare's motives may not matter. https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency
  - pdkl95 12y ago
    I get that stuff - their transparency report is, of course, also very encouraging and another boost to their reputation. (I'll mention that they have more "warrant canaries" than I was aware of previously, which IS a good sign, though the utility of such statements is somewhat uncertain) My concern is that the single point of failure still exists. CloudFlare may have the best of intentions, but they aren't going to be able to stop a national security letter or other threat. Also, attitudes (and CEO/BoD) can change. From a purely engineering point of view, one good hack is what stands between those valuable logs or ssl certs and the various parties that would love to have them. Contrast this with the old manufacturing practice of always requiring a second source for key parts or services, though the analogy isn't perfect.
    - chrisdone 12y ago
      Yes, transparency reports don't mean anything to me. Just because a company says "we're good guys, seriously, look at some numbers", are we to be so impressed? The flaw is not the company's actions, but the user's misplaced trust in a separate, private entity with their data.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
spacefight 12y ago
Great initiative, minor drawbacks such as up to 20% of the traffic wouldn't apply due to their use of SNI: "Globally, more than 80% of requests come from modern browsers, and that percentage is growing quickly." EDIT: Mixed content on that page (within the embedded map at https://cloudflare.github.io/sni-visualization/ https://cloudflare.github.io/sni-visualization/)
- makomk 12y ago
  SNI isn't the only problem either. Apparently they're using ECDSA-based certificates which aren't generally used and aren't supported by older browsers.
  - dspillett 12y ago
    People who are behind the times browser-wise tend to be very behind (IE on XP, Android 2.x/3.x) - so I don't think ECDSA will be much of a limiting factor once you take people who can't access SNI based certs out of consideration.
    - eastdakota 12y ago
      That's correct. There's an almost perfect overlap of browsers that support ECDSA and SNI.
- nknighthb 12y ago
  If your target audience is in the west, it's more like 5-10%, and the problem there is going away. XP and Android 2.x are dropping off pretty quickly.
  - nirvdrum 12y ago
    The larger problem I had was with non-interactive browsers. E.g., GitHub changed their downloads server to use SNI and overnight a bunch of scripts I had using wget on Ubuntu 12.04 (a distribution supported until 2017) stopped working. Java 6 doesn't support SNI, so you need to watch your API stats. And I seem to recall using versions of Python and Ruby that also didn't support it.
LordIllidan 12y ago
This is excellent news - one question though - what would a user on XP see when he accesses one of these sites?
- eastdakota 12y ago
  If Windows XP and Internet Explorer then they'll get a SSL error if visiting via HTTPS. Won't have a problem over HTTP.
  - LordIllidan 12y ago
    Just a normal SSL error, or would they be able to see another site? I had an issue like this with SNI where a client reported being able to see another site that was on the same IP. The issue was that she was using IE on Windows XP, and SNI didn't work.
    - mike-cardwell 12y ago
      A web server can be configured to send a default ssl cert if the browser does not support SNI, but can still route the request to the correct virtual host based on the HTTP Host: header if the customer clicks through the warning. The following two https sites exist on the same IP: grepular.com emailprivacytester.com If your browser doesn't support SNI, then the cert for "grepular.com" will be returned by default. So browsers which don't support SNI will not notice anything unusual when visiting https://grepular.com/ https://grepular.com/, but will get the cert for grepular.com instead of emailprivacytester.com when visiting https://emailprivacytester.com/ https://emailprivacytester.com/ Unless you have IPv6 support, in which case the sites have different IPs so SNI isn't required (exactly like cloudflare have just done)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- cube00 12y ago
  If they are using Chrome they should be OK since that is still supported and is a "modern" browser, however IE under XP would show an error.
zaroth 12y ago
This is great, but just two concerns. CloudFlare just generated itself certs for how many domains? And you don't really have a secure connection but the browser will report that you do.
- josephwegner 12y ago
  They do actually give you the ability to make this totally secure. They mentioned in the post that they will provide instructions on how to install a CloudFlare certificate on your server - this will allow CloudFlare to communicate securely with your server as it attempts to cache your content. Then when the user makes the request to CloudFlare, they return the content that they received over SSL, on an SSL connection. It's like magic. CloudFlare just made a HGUE impact on the internet, IMO.
  - pbreit 12y ago
    Since the vast majority of their customers will not implement the full loop, it seems the huge impact will be further confusing the implications of seeing "https" in the browser.
- iancarroll 12y ago
  CloudFlare doesn't act as the RA, they serve a validation file for the CA's bot to see before issuance.
- spacefight 12y ago
  It sure reads as they genereated 2mio+ certs - that's probably why they thank GlobalSign and Comodo in the blog post. I'm not sure how I should feel, if company x (where I am a registered but non-paying customer in their free tier) gets a cert in my name withouth asking before.
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    A cert in your domain name. Something they could always do. As can anyone you've given control of your domain to. Domain validation is how most certificates are issued.
vertex-four 12y ago
This'll be amazing for phishers and spear phishers - just use CloudFlare, and every user you're targeting will have the green padlock.
- majke 12y ago
  Tor will be amazing for child pornography and terrorists! Come on, vertex-four, every single thing in the universe you do can be turned upside down. TV == violence, telephone == annoying calls, etc. Please have a faith in humanity and give us some optimism. I'm sure SSL can be used for good as well!
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    It can be used for good - I never said it couldn't. I have no doubt that this will be used for much good. It's simply that it'll also be used for a fairly significant amount of bad, and it's worth pointing that out so that we can know that we might have to retrain users that "green padlock" does not necessarily equal "safe" (not that it ever did, but it was often a close enough approximation).
- LordIllidan 12y ago
  Given that ssl certificates are free nowadays (e.g. https://www.startssl.com/ https://www.startssl.com/), how was this not an issue before?
  - feld 12y ago
    startssl is convenient but they force you to pay to revoke your certificates. I've heard rumors of startssl being close to getting on blacklists due to this behavior -- tons of certs were never revoked after heartbleed, for example.
    - nknighthb 12y ago
      Why would a phisher want to revoke their certificate?
escapologybb 12y ago
My website that is behind Cloudflare on the free plan, has suddenly started giving me an error in Google Chrome. The error is as follows: You cannot visit mysite.com right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later. The website has been running for over a year with no problems behind Cloudflare, so I'm assuming this new rollout is the cause. Anybody got any idea how long this will last? Edit: Chrome 38.0.2125.77 on OS X 10.9.4
- eastdakota 12y ago
  Nope, that's not something anything we did would cause. We're not adding HSTS (yet).
  - escapologybb 12y ago
    Strange, I went to bed last night and everything was working and it was just a plain HTTP site sitting behind Cloudflare. Then I get up this morning and I'm getting SSL errors, I'm not sure where to go from here then.
    - jamesog 12y ago
      Are you using the HTTPS Everywhere extension, by any chance?
      - escapologybb 12y ago
        I am. After seeing your comment, I tried loading the site with and without the extension enabled but still the error persists. Edit: formatting
  - escapologybb 12y ago
    Okay, really seems like it is something to do with Cloudflare. When I pause Cloudflare the site loads really quickly every single time, then when I resume using Cloudflare I get the same error in Chrome. In Firefox I'm told by an Cloudflare error page my web server is down, when it's demonstrably not. This is really not my area of expertise, but does it seem to anybody else like this is something to do with the Cloudflare SSL rollout?
dsr_ 12y ago
CloudFlare now has the most sophisticated MITM attack in the world, where they tell you what they are doing and make you sign up for it. Does CloudFlare have a direct pipe to the NSA already, or is that only going to happen next week?
- corobo 12y ago
  Your tinfoil's got a hole in it there buddy! But also https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency Could probs do with being a bit closer to realtime but it's more transparent than most hosts/ISPs
  - dsr_ 12y ago
    CloudFlare has never installed any law enforcement software or equipment anywhere on our network. CloudFlare has never provided any law enforcement organization a feed of our customers' content transiting our network. which is all great, except that the NSA is not a law-enforcement organization. It's an intelligence agency.
    - corobo 12y ago
      You've uncovered the secret behind CloudFlare! They're actually a sub-cell of the NSA! That explains how they're able to do all of this for free accounts
    - eastdakota 12y ago
      I'll state for the records that we've never done any of the above for any intelligence agency either. And, putting my lawyer hat on for a second, if the NSA (or CIA) wanted to compel us to do something they'd send the FBI. On their own, they'd have no authority to compel anything of any US-based organization.
  - emergentcypher 12y ago
    Given the disclosures and discoveries of the last couple years, this isn't tinfoil hat conspiracy material. It's a legitimate concern.
WatchDog 12y ago
Does cloudflare have the ability to issue certificates that are trusted by major browsers? Or will the cloudflare issued certificates simply give users an untrusted CA warning?
- eastdakota 12y ago
  Yes, we've partnered with multiple CAs that allow us to issue certs trusted by virtually every browser.
0x0 12y ago
How can they automatically provision a certificate? Do they run or partner with a CA that doesn't require validation by the actual domain owner? Edit: If so, then what little trust still existed in the HTTPS PKI CA space just went out the window.
- eastdakota 12y ago
  Yes, we partnered with multiple CAs that are trusted by virtually every browser.
  - spacefight 12y ago
    Isn't provisioning certs without at least a simple human interaction from the domain holder against CA rules?
    - rjaco31 12y ago
      Well having a website hosted on Cloudflare implies that you had more interaction than most CAs will ever ask you to get a certificate, that is beside giving them the money.
    - iancarroll 12y ago
      No, I don't think that exists at least in the CA/B Baseline. You have to have consent, obviously, but that's obtained when you sign up for CloudFlare.
      - spacefight 12y ago
        Consent yes, though I can't fully parse "procedures established by". What procedures are meant here? https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/Baseline_Requirements_V1_1_9.pdf https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/Baseline_Requirement... "The CA MUST ensure that the certificate is issued with the consent of, and according to procedures established by, the owner of each Domain Name" EDIT: Here are the established authorization procedures: "11.1.1 Authorization by Domain Name Registrant For each Fully-Qualified Domain Name listed in a Certificate, the CA SHALL confirm that, as of the date the Certificate was issued, the Applicant (or the Applicant’s Parent Company, Subsidiary Company, or Affiliate, collectively referred to as “Applicant” for the purposes of this section) either is the Domain Name Registrant or hascontrol over the FQDN by: 1. Confirming the Applicant as the Domain Name Registrant directly with the Domain Name Registrar; 2. Communicating directly with the Domain Name Registrant using an address, email, or telephone number provided by the Domain Name Registrar; 3. Communicating directly with the Domain Name Registrant using the contact information listed in the WHOIS record’s “registrant”, “technical”, or “administrative” field; 4. Communicating with the Domain’s administrator using an email address created by pre-pending ‘admin’, ‘administrator’, ‘webmaster’, ‘hostmaster’, or ‘postmaster’ inthe local part, followed by the at-sign (“@”), followed by the Domain Name, which may be formed by pruning zero or more components from the requested FQDN; 5. Relying upon a Domain Authorization Document; 6. Having the Applicant demonstrate practical control over the FQDN by making an agreed-upon change to information found on an online Web page identified by a uniform resource identifier containing the FQDN; or 7. Using any other method of confirmation, provided that the CA maintains documented evidence that the method of confirmation establishes that the Applicant is the Domain Name Registrant or has control over the FQDN to at least the same level of assurance as those methods previously described. " IANAL and I'm sure that CF has had this double checked, but I still think it's a bold move to issue certs on their own account.
vader1 12y ago
I have very mixed feelings about this. Yes, on the one hand this is great news because a lot of websites who otherwise never would have bothered with SSL can now be protected from snooping or traffic manipulation on your local (possibly very insecure: your neighborhood Starbucks' wifi) network. On the other hand, this completely destroys the premise of HTTPS that you have an encrypted connection to the website you are visiting. If this catches on big time, seeing the padlock will only tell you that you have an encrypted connection to Cloudflare's network, and no way of knowing if the traffic is still encrypted beyond that, or that it's flowing in plaintext between Cloudflare and the actual target server. Worse, you will have absolutely no way of knowing if the content you're seeing is what the target server originally sent, or that it has been manipulated (or wiretapped) by Cloudflare itself or any of the other hops while en route. If you are going to use this, just keep in mind that you're giving Cloudflare - a US company subject to the Patriot Act and the whole shebang of 3-letter agencies - the ability to collect, intercept, store, and manipulate every single byte of traffic sent between your users and your servers.
- logn 12y ago
  What they should do is require that the server has at least a self-signed certificate. They already support that but don't require it.
  - meowface 12y ago
    I think this is a good idea as well. In their blog post they discuss how "Full SSL" is much better security than "Flexible SSL", but by not making it a requirement a lot of people won't bother with it.
    - ultramancool 12y ago
      "Full SSL" is still useless against an advanced attacker as it does absolutely nothing to prevent MITM. Only "Strict SSL" does, which makes sure it's a valid CA-signed certificate. What we need (and what myself and others have requested) is Full SSL with fingerprint checking so you can keep security with a self-signed cert. I honestly think CF should remove flexible SSL and full SSL as options - they're just too vulnerable to be valuable.
WatchDog 12y ago
What sort of time period are the certificates issued for?
ck2 12y ago
Becoming a single point of massive exploit, they need a warrant canary asap. Not only for US Government but other governments that heavily monitor their citizens on the internet and want to see what is going on so they can imprison or execute their people for what they say.
- jgrahamc 12y ago
  https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency
cynix 12y ago
The majority of CloudFlare's IP addresses are blocked by China's great firewall, which means CloudFlare is out of the question if you expect that your website will be visited by Chinese users.
- eastdakota 12y ago
  1) That's not actually accurate; and 2) Just wait for the next trick we have up our sleeve (https://blog.cloudflare.com/one-more-thing-keyless-ssl-and-cloudflares-growing-network/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/one-more-thing-keyless-ssl-and-c...)
  - cynix 12y ago
    It may not be entirely accurate; I can only go by the complaints I hear from my Chinese friends, and my limited experience with CloudFlare-enabled websites when I'm in China for short stays. However it definitely has significant impact for Chinese users. I see you have big plans for China :) Looking forward to seeing your new data centers coming online. How do you plan to solve the mandatory ICP Registration problem for your customers?
    - korzun 12y ago
      > my limited experience with CloudFlare-enabled websites Sums it up nicely.
  - shimon_e 12y ago
    There are plenty of cloudflare IPs that are blocked. Is cloudflare aware of this? A few were being used for cdnjs which causes problems for anyone using cdnjs.
- Dolimiter 12y ago
  That can't be correct, I get lots of traffic from China, and use Cloudflare. Unfortunately, the traffic is often SQL injection type garbage, so I'm going to be upgrading to Cloudflare Pro as it seems they block such traffic.
dividuum 12y ago
EDIT: Won't work: You need to verify that you own the domain by pointing your NS records to cloudflares nameservers. What prevents me from doing this MITM attack in (for example) a public wifi: I add a domain I don't own (example.com) to my cloudflare account. Then I point a hostname (www.example.com) to an IP address I own (1.2.3.4). From what I understand, cloudflare now serves HTTPS for this domain through their proxies. I can easily find out the IP of one of those by querying the nameserver they assiged me by doing "dig www.example.com @gene.ns.cloudflare.com". Now when I spoof DNS responses, I can return one of those IPs. The traffic will go to cloudflare. They have a signed certificate for that domain and the traffic gets forwarded to my IP (1.2.3.4). Maybe I'm missing something, but I tried the http part of this and proxying seems to work before cloudflare comfirmed that the (in the example) example.com domains nameserver actually points to cloudflares nameservers.
- iancarroll 12y ago
  That wouldn't work. CloudFlare isn't acting as the RA (the person verifying you own example.com). They serve a verification file at example.com, but the bot cannot see this file as example.com isn't pointing to CloudFlare.
  - dividuum 12y ago
    Not sure I'm following you. Probably because I didn't use SSL on cloudflare before, so I don't know about any verification file. How does that work? I guess before serving SSL traffic for a domain they verify both that the nameserver for a domain is actually one of cloudflares nameservers AND they test for the presence of some kind of signed file that has to be reachable on the domain you added?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
      - dividuum 12y ago
        Understood. But how does that work in cloudflares case? Since they magically upgrade 2 million websites by the end of the day I cannot imagine all those sites have those verification files available.
tomkwok 12y ago
Thank you guys for free TLS/SSL, but if I have a website/blog hosted on free services offered by PaaS providers, like Heroku or RedHat's OpenShift, to which I've CNAME'd a custom .com domain which is the only domain I want public access on, and I don't want "Full SSL" (Non-strict) which makes MITM attacks between CF and the PaaS provider viable (although very unlikely). Can I pin the certificate from PaaS providers for .herokuapp.com or .rhcloud.com to enable "Full SSL" (Strict) on CF? Although the SSL support for custom domains is a paid feature for most PaaS providers, this won't be true now if this is possible.
higherpurpose 12y ago
> These challenges required that, for free customers, we limit Universal SSL support to modern browsers. Modern browsers include support for ECDSA, where many legacy browsers do not. I hope in the (near) future, they'll enforce not using unsafe NIST curves for that, too. I don't think Internet Explorer supports Curve25519 or other safer curves right now, but it might in the future, and I hope they will make their move then. Also, I hope Cloudflare has tripled its security team along with this, because they're going to be #1 on NSA's "to-break" list now.
- AlyssaRowan 12y ago
  There's a draft for X25519 (as the key exchange algorithm is named now) already. Future use for new curves has been referred to CFRG by the TLS working group for recommendations; Curve25519 is one of the lead contenders. Discussion is lively, that's about all I feel comfortable saying right now. :)
unwind 12y ago
I just wonder how many actual physical human users those "99.44%" of the traffic from Antarctica represent. It's not exactly a population density hotspot, is it? :) Juggling the number around a bit it seems to correspond to 1/179th, but Wikipedia says that the population of Antarctica varies with the season between 1,000 and 5,000.
artursapek 12y ago
This is a very impressive achievement by CloudFront, but I wonder how many "this page includes other resources which are not secure" warnings I will notice today from websites that weren't prepared for this.
daveasdf 12y ago
This was indeed a pleasant surprise when I logged into my CloudFlare account. What intrigues me is that CloudFlare missed an opportunity to allow secure self-signed certificates. The new CloudFlare SSL setup allows the origin server to present to CloudFlare's servers either (i) an unverified self-signed certificates; or (ii) a certificate signed by a CA. Neither provides great security. In the former case, a MITM can trivially generate a new self-signed certificate. History has shown the latter case is also problematic, as there have been several events where CAs have generated invalid keys [1]. What would be nice is if I could generate a self-signed certificate and upload the fingerprint(s) to CloudFlare. CloudFlare would could then verify the fingerprint when connecting to my origin server, without needing to trust a CA. Am I missing anything obvious as to why this wouldn't be as secure (or more secure) than the two options CloudFlare has introduced? [1]: For instance: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/further-improving-digital-certificate.html http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/further-...
- jgrahamc 12y ago
  Expect a further announcement down the line. We are working on solutions similar to those that you propose.
- jlgaddis 12y ago
  I recall reading here on HN recently something about CloudFlare having their own internal CA infrastructure. I would expect them to allow customers to start generating certificates (signed by their internal CA) that they can deploy on the origin server.
- zaroth 12y ago
  Personally, I was really hoping the backend connection would be secured by spiped, cutting the unnecessary complexity of TLS and certificate validation completely out of it. That might exclude Windows servers (until someone ports it), and maybe harder in some cases to setup.
deanclatworthy 12y ago
I just got the popup, clicked "okay" and when I go to "Cloudflare settings", it's still only available to select SSL options for the paid plans. For those who haven't yet seen the popup there's a bit more info here: https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl#universal_ssl https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl#universal_ssl It's a pity that I got the message saying it was available on my account, when the setting is not yet activated :)
- pencoyd 12y ago
  Working on that. Lots and lots of certs to issue. Seeing about making message "smarter" (checking your individual status) if possible.
- tokenizerrr 12y ago
  Just had the exact same experience, this is still great though. Looking forward to enabling SSL on my site (at no cost).
- jgrahamc 12y ago
  Yes, sorry about that. We're rushing to set up certificates for everyone who uses CloudFlare.
  - deanclatworthy 12y ago
    Understandable. I've waited months since you first teased about this. I can wait a few more hours ;-)
edent 12y ago
Interestingly, I just tried to visit one of my CloudFlare protected sites. Shoving https in front of the URL results in this error in Firefox & Chrome. dabr.eu uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for the following names: ssl2000.cloudflare.com, .redpitt.mobi, redpitt.mobi, cloudflare.com, .cloudflare.com So I assume it isn't quite as seamless / automated as it makes out? edit ah - a little further reading says it will roll out over the next few days.
- jgrahamc 12y ago
  Your cert hasn't been issued yet. We are in the processing of issuing 2 million certs. You got a default cert that's sort of a 'catch all'. When that goes away your domain will have been issued a real cert.
  - edent 12y ago
    Faster man! Faster! :-) Thanks for doing this - such an excellent initiative.
    - jgrahamc 12y ago
      Since you ask so nicely I had your domain bumped up in the queue.
      - jgrahamc 12y ago
        And now... $ curl -v https://dabr.eu * Adding handle: conn: 0x7faa1c000000 * Adding handle: send: 0 * Adding handle: recv: 0 * Curl_addHandleToPipeline: length: 1 * - Conn 0 (0x7faa1c000000) send_pipe: 1, recv_pipe: 0 * About to connect() to dabr.eu port 443 (#0) * Trying 104.28.21.97... * Connected to dabr.eu (104.28.21.97) port 443 (#0) * TLS 1.2 connection using TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 * Server certificate: sni10021.cloudflaressl.com * Server certificate: COMODO ECC Domain Validation Secure Server CA 2 * Server certificate: COMODO ECC Certification Authority * Server certificate: AddTrust External CA Root > GET / HTTP/1.1 > User-Agent: curl/7.30.0 > Host: dabr.eu > Accept: */*
endijs 12y ago
Enabled this, but when visiting website over https have error. "You attempted to reach YYYY, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as ssl2000.cloudflare.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of YYYY." Looks like things are still in progress and does not work out of the box. Will see what will be in a day or couple.
- jgrahamc 12y ago
  We are in the process of issuing 2 million certs. Your cert hasn't been issued yet so you are hitting a sort of 'default cert'. Once that error goes away you are set.
  - endijs 12y ago
    If i choose to ignore SSL warning I get ERROR 522. But I guess its better now to sit and relax while CF catches up with all this migration.
sarciszewski 12y ago
As I've said on Twitter, I'm excited to see this happen. Not because I think this will help against the NSA, FBI, et al. who are armed with NSLs and FISA letters, but because I believe (hope?) it will set a trend towards making security free for defenders and prohibitively expensive for attackers.
diafygi 12y ago
Will users be able to download their private keys for the provisioned cert? If not, would CloudFlare ever consider provisioning free SSL certs for non-CloudFlare customers (i.e. let us uploade our crt file and you have your CAs sign it)? We desperately need an alternative to StartCom, since many devs don't trust them[1]. I've suggested AOL in another thread[2], but so far I can't find anyone who works there to talk to. EDIT: To be clear, I'm very happy for this release and thanks to CloudFlare for stepping up. [1] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041087#c13 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041087#c13 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374685
- thoughtpolice 12y ago
  I believe the CEO said in their last post here that certificate pinning and custom certificates (even EV ones) would be supported by their new plans. (Can't remember if you have to pay $$$, though) I imagine it will take a short amount of time after this change to realize that.
- andreasvc 12y ago
  A private key should never be given to a third party (preferably not even a trusted one), and downloading the private key generated by CloudFlare would also negate the "private" feature. Furthermore, you don't upload a crt (certficate) file for a CA to sign, because that is the result of a CA's signature. You upload a certificate signing request (csr) after having generated a private key on the same machine where the key/certficate will be used; this way you are sure you have never lost control over the private key. With respect to StartCom I don't really see the problem or why anyone would step up to offer something better for free. Certificates are a money making business and with StartCom you get the security you pay for ...
prefork 12y ago
I wonder what happens to certificates if a customer leaves Cloudflare? What keeps revocation lists from ballooning as customers "try out" the service?
- cmircea 12y ago
  OCSP?
ancarda 12y ago
Once IPv6 is a bit more popular, will CloudFlare use a unique IP per customer to get around SNI or will it still be used on IPv6? It seems a bit like NAT; something that can safely die once IPv4 is gone.
- snewman 12y ago
  According to the article, they are already doing that.
  - ancarda 12y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out, I seemed to have missed it.
- psykovsky 12y ago
  So, you want NAT to die, but apparently you forget that NAT is what protects most domestic computers from intrusion, not anti-virus or software firewalls. It will be fun...
  - ancarda 12y ago
    I'm aware a lot of people use NAT as a cheap firewall. I suspect decent home routers will have a basic firewall for IPv6, even if it just works based on ports.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    That use of NAT can trivially be replaced by an everything-out nothing-in firewall.
    - psykovsky 12y ago
      You expect technologically illiterate people to magically be able to protect themselves when they couldn't before?
  - X-Istence 12y ago
    NAT is not security.
Xdes 12y ago
There's a nice red and green map that colorblind people cannot see.
voidlogic 12y ago
I'm sure small ISP's that run transparent caches are really excited about this...
rietta 12y ago
This is very welcome news from my point of view as a developer and security consultant, enough that I blogged about it first thing this morning at http://rietta.com/blog/2014/09/29/universal-ssl-with-cloudflare/ http://rietta.com/blog/2014/09/29/universal-ssl-with-cloudfl.... There are industries where off-premises key management is not appropriate and certainly not a trusted man-in-the-middle by a third-party vendor. For these organizations, having any party be in the position to be able to intercept communications is a total no-go. But for a lot of the internet community that is not the primary threat to model. Rather its inertia that prevents SSL from being set up in the first place because it is seen as either expensive, hard, or somehow unnecessary. For these circumstances, protecting users from criminal surveillance at the local coffee shop and from content manipulation by unscrupulous, unaccountable cable internet service providers is a very good thing. I have clients who I will advise to pass on this based upon their threat model and others for whom this is a great option. For my own blog, this is perfect too. It's about knowing your threat model and choosing the appropriate countermeasures accordingly.
rang 12y ago
Good job cloudflare for finally keeping up with the industry. Cloudfront, for example, already supports universal ssl and SNI
- LewisJEllis 12y ago
  Cloudflare has offered SSL & SNI for paid customers for ages. You're missing the point.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- xxdesmus 12y ago
  yeah, no. We've offered SSL for 4 years now. This is entirely different. Cloudfront, for example, doesn't give you SSL for free.
  - rang 12y ago
    Customers have to pay for dedicated ipv4 address space. There's no way around that. SNI should be free as they don't require dedicated IPs. But it doesn't look like that was the case for cloudflare
akama 12y ago
One of the little things here is the use of SPDY. I'm not sure how feel about this change. On one hand it will save a great deal of resources, but it will make the protocol more unapproachable. Is this a change that the web needs to make?
brokentone 12y ago
One possibly negative outcome of this could be SEO related. In my research thus far, Google has suggested that HTTPS _could_ increase your ranking to a very small degree, but the question is whether they consider this duplicate content.
arikrak 12y ago
This is a major (and long-planned) move on CloudFlare's part. They're going to lose money in the short-term, since the primary reason many small-to-medium-sized sites upgrade to CloudFlare Pro is to get SSL support. Many other sites will now switch to CloudFlare to get instant (partial) SSL. CloudFlare isn't a charity so they'll need to introduce new features or limits to get people to upgrade to pro. Though they may get enough enough revenue from their partner one-click apps to offset their costs.
general_failure 12y ago
This is silly. SSL is supposed to be a secure conversation between the website and the end user. No one else is between. Encouraging these things is detrimental to internet. In fact, I would go ahead and say: * Make browser self-signed certs less scarier * Make users more accustomed and knowledgable of self-signed certs. Browser vendors and corporations need to work together to make the above happen.
- RadioactiveMan 12y ago
  Consider the discussion taking place in other comments - SSL has never guaranteed a conversation between client and a server at the "end". The concept of one server at the end of your connection is wrong. Often, you'll be connected to a load balancer that terminates SSL and communicates with other servers over plain text. Or, you might reach an HTTP server that communicates with other services ( perhaps a database ) and you have no guarantee that those connections are over SSL or take place on internal networks ( as if internal would make it more secure ). Besides SSL itself and the serving of your particular request, what else is being done with the information you've sent? Perhaps they're storing data or sharing it in ways you would not approve of. Trusting the services you connect to is the real tough problem and it has little to do with SSL.
igouss 12y ago
Can somebody explain to me 1) why SSL certificats are so expensive 2) Why do they have to expire?
- spydum 12y ago
  1) theoretically, it's essentially the background check the CA's perform to ensure you are you 2) to ensure you still are you, and to setup a nice recurring revenue stream for the CA's :) (err it probably has something to do with security)
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  1) They are not, really. You can get free DV certs from StartSSL. Other types of certs do cost money because issuing them involves real work. I don't know how else to explain it. Go look at the list of things a CA has to do to be considered trustable by the major root store operators (operating system vendors, browser makers). It's not trivial. 2) The original reason was because it was assumed (correctly) that due to hardware improvements keys that were previously strong would become weak. So it was supposed to encode a length of time after which the cert owner would be forced to re-evaluate key strength. Nowadays the browser makers are tending to lean on CAs to push expiry times downwards so they expire quicker, the reason being that updating the SSL ecosystem often requires new features or changes in certificates, and if certs can last 5 years then it means a full upgrade takes 5 years, whereas if certs expire after one year then one year after deployment begins everyone is updated. Pretty big difference. It's for this reason that EV certs are specced to expire after a year: it means standards can be revved quicker.
damonpace 12y ago
Congrats to CF on this. The day has come where all domains & subdomains should automatically be SSL encrypted for free. CF is building the Internet as it should have been built in the first place. I love that they are doing this.
notastartup 12y ago
so how does this differ from the paid plan? I mean the only reason I am paying is because of SSL and now it's free?
- kijin 12y ago
  The SSL on free plans is only compatible with newer clients. The SSL on paid plans is compatible with all clients, such as IE on XP, Android 2.x, and slightly outdated HTTP wrappers for most programming languages.
  - notastartup 12y ago
    will the ssl be available on Chrome 37? by newer clients what versions of browser exactly?
    - kijin 12y ago
      https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl#browsers https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl#browsers
danielsju6 12y ago
So they put a lot of effort into promoting SNI. A potential gotcha to consider, especially for peeps on HN; SNI isn't supported by a lot of Android, including the default download manager and parts of the networking stack—that bit me recently in development. At least as far back as 4.4.0.

712 points by benjojo12 12y ago

First, let me say that the aggressive approach to actually making encryption happen that CloudFlare has been pushing recently is very commendable. The hard part about finally retiring the old plaintext protocols we currently are stuck with is critical mass - nobody sees the point when plaintext seems to "work just fine". The various steps CloudFlare has taken to encourage SSL will go a long way towards reversing that attitude. That said, I worry about the future we are creating by entrusting so much security and traffic to a single point of failure.[1] It seems to me that CloudFlare is positioning themselves as another Google or Facebook, where a key feature of their business is that they get to track the web history of a large portion of internet users. Much like Google gets to have a lot of my email when other party is @gmail.com, CloudFlare gets click histories by people using their CDN and caching/filtering servers. While I don't really know anything about the motives and personalities behind the company, I can give them the benefit of the doubt for now. Unfortunately, their motives don't matter - in a world where "national security letters" Prism, XKeyscore, and the like exist, CloudFlare's motives may not matter. Even more concerning is that while it my hard to avoid Google's tracking, it is at least theoretically possible. With CloudFlare (or any similar service) we are stuck with a situation similar to tinyurl/t.co/bit.ly [2] where content is hidden behind serves from which you have to request the real URL (or in this case, the content itself). Don't get me wrong - SSL becoming significantly more common is good regardless of what else is going on, and CloudFlare still deserves a lot of praise for advancing a problem that has been so resistant to progress in the past. I would even agree that CloudFlare's caching services and security protections are (very) good engineering techniques that we should be using. It just seems like everybody is (yet again) setting up a single point of failure that will suddenly have very significant consequences the minute somebody with real power decides they want those very-revealing server logs. [1] I'd be the first to admit I don't have the best understanding of how CloudFlare works; corrections to any misunderstandings I may have about their business or tech would be greatly appreciated. [2] http://preview.tinyurl.com/feckless-imbroglio http://preview.tinyurl.com/feckless-imbroglio

jgrahamc 12y ago
It seems to me that CloudFlare is positioning themselves as another Google or Facebook, where a key feature of their business is that they get to track the web history of a large portion of internet users. CloudFlare's business model is not offering a free service and figure out how to make money. It's getting people to pay us money and those people are our actual customers who run web sites: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans https://www.cloudflare.com/plans Unfortunately, their motives don't matter - in a world where "national security letters" Prism, XKeyscore, and the like exist, CloudFlare's motives may not matter. https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency
- pdkl95 12y ago
  I get that stuff - their transparency report is, of course, also very encouraging and another boost to their reputation. (I'll mention that they have more "warrant canaries" than I was aware of previously, which IS a good sign, though the utility of such statements is somewhat uncertain) My concern is that the single point of failure still exists. CloudFlare may have the best of intentions, but they aren't going to be able to stop a national security letter or other threat. Also, attitudes (and CEO/BoD) can change. From a purely engineering point of view, one good hack is what stands between those valuable logs or ssl certs and the various parties that would love to have them. Contrast this with the old manufacturing practice of always requiring a second source for key parts or services, though the analogy isn't perfect.
  - chrisdone 12y ago
    Yes, transparency reports don't mean anything to me. Just because a company says "we're good guys, seriously, look at some numbers", are we to be so impressed? The flaw is not the company's actions, but the user's misplaced trust in a separate, private entity with their data.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- higherpurpose 12y ago

spacefight 12y ago

Great initiative, minor drawbacks such as up to 20% of the traffic wouldn't apply due to their use of SNI: "Globally, more than 80% of requests come from modern browsers, and that percentage is growing quickly." EDIT: Mixed content on that page (within the embedded map at https://cloudflare.github.io/sni-visualization/ https://cloudflare.github.io/sni-visualization/)

makomk 12y ago
SNI isn't the only problem either. Apparently they're using ECDSA-based certificates which aren't generally used and aren't supported by older browsers.
- dspillett 12y ago
  People who are behind the times browser-wise tend to be very behind (IE on XP, Android 2.x/3.x) - so I don't think ECDSA will be much of a limiting factor once you take people who can't access SNI based certs out of consideration.
  - eastdakota 12y ago
    That's correct. There's an almost perfect overlap of browsers that support ECDSA and SNI.
nknighthb 12y ago
If your target audience is in the west, it's more like 5-10%, and the problem there is going away. XP and Android 2.x are dropping off pretty quickly.
- nirvdrum 12y ago
  The larger problem I had was with non-interactive browsers. E.g., GitHub changed their downloads server to use SNI and overnight a bunch of scripts I had using wget on Ubuntu 12.04 (a distribution supported until 2017) stopped working. Java 6 doesn't support SNI, so you need to watch your API stats. And I seem to recall using versions of Python and Ruby that also didn't support it.

LordIllidan 12y ago

This is excellent news - one question though - what would a user on XP see when he accesses one of these sites?

eastdakota 12y ago
If Windows XP and Internet Explorer then they'll get a SSL error if visiting via HTTPS. Won't have a problem over HTTP.
- LordIllidan 12y ago
  Just a normal SSL error, or would they be able to see another site? I had an issue like this with SNI where a client reported being able to see another site that was on the same IP. The issue was that she was using IE on Windows XP, and SNI didn't work.
  - mike-cardwell 12y ago
    A web server can be configured to send a default ssl cert if the browser does not support SNI, but can still route the request to the correct virtual host based on the HTTP Host: header if the customer clicks through the warning. The following two https sites exist on the same IP: grepular.com emailprivacytester.com If your browser doesn't support SNI, then the cert for "grepular.com" will be returned by default. So browsers which don't support SNI will not notice anything unusual when visiting https://grepular.com/ https://grepular.com/, but will get the cert for grepular.com instead of emailprivacytester.com when visiting https://emailprivacytester.com/ https://emailprivacytester.com/ Unless you have IPv6 support, in which case the sites have different IPs so SNI isn't required (exactly like cloudflare have just done)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
cube00 12y ago
If they are using Chrome they should be OK since that is still supported and is a "modern" browser, however IE under XP would show an error.

zaroth 12y ago

This is great, but just two concerns. CloudFlare just generated itself certs for how many domains? And you don't really have a secure connection but the browser will report that you do.

josephwegner 12y ago
They do actually give you the ability to make this totally secure. They mentioned in the post that they will provide instructions on how to install a CloudFlare certificate on your server - this will allow CloudFlare to communicate securely with your server as it attempts to cache your content. Then when the user makes the request to CloudFlare, they return the content that they received over SSL, on an SSL connection. It's like magic. CloudFlare just made a HGUE impact on the internet, IMO.
- pbreit 12y ago
  Since the vast majority of their customers will not implement the full loop, it seems the huge impact will be further confusing the implications of seeing "https" in the browser.
iancarroll 12y ago
CloudFlare doesn't act as the RA, they serve a validation file for the CA's bot to see before issuance.
spacefight 12y ago
It sure reads as they genereated 2mio+ certs - that's probably why they thank GlobalSign and Comodo in the blog post. I'm not sure how I should feel, if company x (where I am a registered but non-paying customer in their free tier) gets a cert in my name withouth asking before.
- nknighthb 12y ago
  A cert in your domain name. Something they could always do. As can anyone you've given control of your domain to. Domain validation is how most certificates are issued.

vertex-four 12y ago

This'll be amazing for phishers and spear phishers - just use CloudFlare, and every user you're targeting will have the green padlock.

majke 12y ago
Tor will be amazing for child pornography and terrorists! Come on, vertex-four, every single thing in the universe you do can be turned upside down. TV == violence, telephone == annoying calls, etc. Please have a faith in humanity and give us some optimism. I'm sure SSL can be used for good as well!
- vertex-four 12y ago
  It can be used for good - I never said it couldn't. I have no doubt that this will be used for much good. It's simply that it'll also be used for a fairly significant amount of bad, and it's worth pointing that out so that we can know that we might have to retrain users that "green padlock" does not necessarily equal "safe" (not that it ever did, but it was often a close enough approximation).
LordIllidan 12y ago
Given that ssl certificates are free nowadays (e.g. https://www.startssl.com/ https://www.startssl.com/), how was this not an issue before?
- feld 12y ago
  startssl is convenient but they force you to pay to revoke your certificates. I've heard rumors of startssl being close to getting on blacklists due to this behavior -- tons of certs were never revoked after heartbleed, for example.
  - nknighthb 12y ago
    Why would a phisher want to revoke their certificate?

escapologybb 12y ago

My website that is behind Cloudflare on the free plan, has suddenly started giving me an error in Google Chrome. The error is as follows: You cannot visit mysite.com right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later. The website has been running for over a year with no problems behind Cloudflare, so I'm assuming this new rollout is the cause. Anybody got any idea how long this will last? Edit: Chrome 38.0.2125.77 on OS X 10.9.4

eastdakota 12y ago
Nope, that's not something anything we did would cause. We're not adding HSTS (yet).
- escapologybb 12y ago
  Strange, I went to bed last night and everything was working and it was just a plain HTTP site sitting behind Cloudflare. Then I get up this morning and I'm getting SSL errors, I'm not sure where to go from here then.
  - jamesog 12y ago
    Are you using the HTTPS Everywhere extension, by any chance?
    - escapologybb 12y ago
      I am. After seeing your comment, I tried loading the site with and without the extension enabled but still the error persists. Edit: formatting
- escapologybb 12y ago
  Okay, really seems like it is something to do with Cloudflare. When I pause Cloudflare the site loads really quickly every single time, then when I resume using Cloudflare I get the same error in Chrome. In Firefox I'm told by an Cloudflare error page my web server is down, when it's demonstrably not. This is really not my area of expertise, but does it seem to anybody else like this is something to do with the Cloudflare SSL rollout?

dsr_ 12y ago

CloudFlare now has the most sophisticated MITM attack in the world, where they tell you what they are doing and make you sign up for it. Does CloudFlare have a direct pipe to the NSA already, or is that only going to happen next week?

corobo 12y ago
Your tinfoil's got a hole in it there buddy! But also https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency Could probs do with being a bit closer to realtime but it's more transparent than most hosts/ISPs
- dsr_ 12y ago
  CloudFlare has never installed any law enforcement software or equipment anywhere on our network. CloudFlare has never provided any law enforcement organization a feed of our customers' content transiting our network. which is all great, except that the NSA is not a law-enforcement organization. It's an intelligence agency.
  - corobo 12y ago
    You've uncovered the secret behind CloudFlare! They're actually a sub-cell of the NSA! That explains how they're able to do all of this for free accounts
  - eastdakota 12y ago
    I'll state for the records that we've never done any of the above for any intelligence agency either. And, putting my lawyer hat on for a second, if the NSA (or CIA) wanted to compel us to do something they'd send the FBI. On their own, they'd have no authority to compel anything of any US-based organization.
- emergentcypher 12y ago
  Given the disclosures and discoveries of the last couple years, this isn't tinfoil hat conspiracy material. It's a legitimate concern.

WatchDog 12y ago

Does cloudflare have the ability to issue certificates that are trusted by major browsers? Or will the cloudflare issued certificates simply give users an untrusted CA warning?

eastdakota 12y ago
Yes, we've partnered with multiple CAs that allow us to issue certs trusted by virtually every browser.

0x0 12y ago

How can they automatically provision a certificate? Do they run or partner with a CA that doesn't require validation by the actual domain owner? Edit: If so, then what little trust still existed in the HTTPS PKI CA space just went out the window.

eastdakota 12y ago
Yes, we partnered with multiple CAs that are trusted by virtually every browser.
- spacefight 12y ago
  Isn't provisioning certs without at least a simple human interaction from the domain holder against CA rules?
  - rjaco31 12y ago
    Well having a website hosted on Cloudflare implies that you had more interaction than most CAs will ever ask you to get a certificate, that is beside giving them the money.
  - iancarroll 12y ago
    No, I don't think that exists at least in the CA/B Baseline. You have to have consent, obviously, but that's obtained when you sign up for CloudFlare.
    - spacefight 12y ago
      Consent yes, though I can't fully parse "procedures established by". What procedures are meant here? https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/Baseline_Requirements_V1_1_9.pdf https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/Baseline_Requirement... "The CA MUST ensure that the certificate is issued with the consent of, and according to procedures established by, the owner of each Domain Name" EDIT: Here are the established authorization procedures: "11.1.1 Authorization by Domain Name Registrant For each Fully-Qualified Domain Name listed in a Certificate, the CA SHALL confirm that, as of the date the Certificate was issued, the Applicant (or the Applicant’s Parent Company, Subsidiary Company, or Affiliate, collectively referred to as “Applicant” for the purposes of this section) either is the Domain Name Registrant or hascontrol over the FQDN by: 1. Confirming the Applicant as the Domain Name Registrant directly with the Domain Name Registrar; 2. Communicating directly with the Domain Name Registrant using an address, email, or telephone number provided by the Domain Name Registrar; 3. Communicating directly with the Domain Name Registrant using the contact information listed in the WHOIS record’s “registrant”, “technical”, or “administrative” field; 4. Communicating with the Domain’s administrator using an email address created by pre-pending ‘admin’, ‘administrator’, ‘webmaster’, ‘hostmaster’, or ‘postmaster’ inthe local part, followed by the at-sign (“@”), followed by the Domain Name, which may be formed by pruning zero or more components from the requested FQDN; 5. Relying upon a Domain Authorization Document; 6. Having the Applicant demonstrate practical control over the FQDN by making an agreed-upon change to information found on an online Web page identified by a uniform resource identifier containing the FQDN; or 7. Using any other method of confirmation, provided that the CA maintains documented evidence that the method of confirmation establishes that the Applicant is the Domain Name Registrant or has control over the FQDN to at least the same level of assurance as those methods previously described. " IANAL and I'm sure that CF has had this double checked, but I still think it's a bold move to issue certs on their own account.

vader1 12y ago

I have very mixed feelings about this. Yes, on the one hand this is great news because a lot of websites who otherwise never would have bothered with SSL can now be protected from snooping or traffic manipulation on your local (possibly very insecure: your neighborhood Starbucks' wifi) network. On the other hand, this completely destroys the premise of HTTPS that you have an encrypted connection to the website you are visiting. If this catches on big time, seeing the padlock will only tell you that you have an encrypted connection to Cloudflare's network, and no way of knowing if the traffic is still encrypted beyond that, or that it's flowing in plaintext between Cloudflare and the actual target server. Worse, you will have absolutely no way of knowing if the content you're seeing is what the target server originally sent, or that it has been manipulated (or wiretapped) by Cloudflare itself or any of the other hops while en route. If you are going to use this, just keep in mind that you're giving Cloudflare - a US company subject to the Patriot Act and the whole shebang of 3-letter agencies - the ability to collect, intercept, store, and manipulate every single byte of traffic sent between your users and your servers.

logn 12y ago
What they should do is require that the server has at least a self-signed certificate. They already support that but don't require it.
- meowface 12y ago
  I think this is a good idea as well. In their blog post they discuss how "Full SSL" is much better security than "Flexible SSL", but by not making it a requirement a lot of people won't bother with it.
  - ultramancool 12y ago
    "Full SSL" is still useless against an advanced attacker as it does absolutely nothing to prevent MITM. Only "Strict SSL" does, which makes sure it's a valid CA-signed certificate. What we need (and what myself and others have requested) is Full SSL with fingerprint checking so you can keep security with a self-signed cert. I honestly think CF should remove flexible SSL and full SSL as options - they're just too vulnerable to be valuable.

WatchDog 12y ago

What sort of time period are the certificates issued for?

ck2 12y ago

Becoming a single point of massive exploit, they need a warrant canary asap. Not only for US Government but other governments that heavily monitor their citizens on the internet and want to see what is going on so they can imprison or execute their people for what they say.

jgrahamc 12y ago
https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency

cynix 12y ago

The majority of CloudFlare's IP addresses are blocked by China's great firewall, which means CloudFlare is out of the question if you expect that your website will be visited by Chinese users.

eastdakota 12y ago
1) That's not actually accurate; and 2) Just wait for the next trick we have up our sleeve (https://blog.cloudflare.com/one-more-thing-keyless-ssl-and-cloudflares-growing-network/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/one-more-thing-keyless-ssl-and-c...)
- cynix 12y ago
  It may not be entirely accurate; I can only go by the complaints I hear from my Chinese friends, and my limited experience with CloudFlare-enabled websites when I'm in China for short stays. However it definitely has significant impact for Chinese users. I see you have big plans for China :) Looking forward to seeing your new data centers coming online. How do you plan to solve the mandatory ICP Registration problem for your customers?
  - korzun 12y ago
    > my limited experience with CloudFlare-enabled websites Sums it up nicely.
- shimon_e 12y ago
  There are plenty of cloudflare IPs that are blocked. Is cloudflare aware of this? A few were being used for cdnjs which causes problems for anyone using cdnjs.
Dolimiter 12y ago
That can't be correct, I get lots of traffic from China, and use Cloudflare. Unfortunately, the traffic is often SQL injection type garbage, so I'm going to be upgrading to Cloudflare Pro as it seems they block such traffic.

dividuum 12y ago

EDIT: Won't work: You need to verify that you own the domain by pointing your NS records to cloudflares nameservers. What prevents me from doing this MITM attack in (for example) a public wifi: I add a domain I don't own (example.com) to my cloudflare account. Then I point a hostname (www.example.com) to an IP address I own (1.2.3.4). From what I understand, cloudflare now serves HTTPS for this domain through their proxies. I can easily find out the IP of one of those by querying the nameserver they assiged me by doing "dig www.example.com @gene.ns.cloudflare.com". Now when I spoof DNS responses, I can return one of those IPs. The traffic will go to cloudflare. They have a signed certificate for that domain and the traffic gets forwarded to my IP (1.2.3.4). Maybe I'm missing something, but I tried the http part of this and proxying seems to work before cloudflare comfirmed that the (in the example) example.com domains nameserver actually points to cloudflares nameservers.

iancarroll 12y ago
That wouldn't work. CloudFlare isn't acting as the RA (the person verifying you own example.com). They serve a verification file at example.com, but the bot cannot see this file as example.com isn't pointing to CloudFlare.
- dividuum 12y ago
  Not sure I'm following you. Probably because I didn't use SSL on cloudflare before, so I don't know about any verification file. How does that work? I guess before serving SSL traffic for a domain they verify both that the nameserver for a domain is actually one of cloudflares nameservers AND they test for the presence of some kind of signed file that has to be reachable on the domain you added?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - dividuum 12y ago
      Understood. But how does that work in cloudflares case? Since they magically upgrade 2 million websites by the end of the day I cannot imagine all those sites have those verification files available.

tomkwok 12y ago

Thank you guys for free TLS/SSL, but if I have a website/blog hosted on free services offered by PaaS providers, like Heroku or RedHat's OpenShift, to which I've CNAME'd a custom .com domain which is the only domain I want public access on, and I don't want "Full SSL" (Non-strict) which makes MITM attacks between CF and the PaaS provider viable (although very unlikely). Can I pin the certificate from PaaS providers for .herokuapp.com or .rhcloud.com to enable "Full SSL" (Strict) on CF? Although the SSL support for custom domains is a paid feature for most PaaS providers, this won't be true now if this is possible.

higherpurpose 12y ago

> These challenges required that, for free customers, we limit Universal SSL support to modern browsers. Modern browsers include support for ECDSA, where many legacy browsers do not. I hope in the (near) future, they'll enforce not using unsafe NIST curves for that, too. I don't think Internet Explorer supports Curve25519 or other safer curves right now, but it might in the future, and I hope they will make their move then. Also, I hope Cloudflare has tripled its security team along with this, because they're going to be #1 on NSA's "to-break" list now.

AlyssaRowan 12y ago
There's a draft for X25519 (as the key exchange algorithm is named now) already. Future use for new curves has been referred to CFRG by the TLS working group for recommendations; Curve25519 is one of the lead contenders. Discussion is lively, that's about all I feel comfortable saying right now. :)

unwind 12y ago

I just wonder how many actual physical human users those "99.44%" of the traffic from Antarctica represent. It's not exactly a population density hotspot, is it? :) Juggling the number around a bit it seems to correspond to 1/179th, but Wikipedia says that the population of Antarctica varies with the season between 1,000 and 5,000.

artursapek 12y ago

This is a very impressive achievement by CloudFront, but I wonder how many "this page includes other resources which are not secure" warnings I will notice today from websites that weren't prepared for this.

daveasdf 12y ago

This was indeed a pleasant surprise when I logged into my CloudFlare account. What intrigues me is that CloudFlare missed an opportunity to allow secure self-signed certificates. The new CloudFlare SSL setup allows the origin server to present to CloudFlare's servers either (i) an unverified self-signed certificates; or (ii) a certificate signed by a CA. Neither provides great security. In the former case, a MITM can trivially generate a new self-signed certificate. History has shown the latter case is also problematic, as there have been several events where CAs have generated invalid keys [1]. What would be nice is if I could generate a self-signed certificate and upload the fingerprint(s) to CloudFlare. CloudFlare would could then verify the fingerprint when connecting to my origin server, without needing to trust a CA. Am I missing anything obvious as to why this wouldn't be as secure (or more secure) than the two options CloudFlare has introduced? [1]: For instance: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/further-improving-digital-certificate.html http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/further-...

jgrahamc 12y ago
Expect a further announcement down the line. We are working on solutions similar to those that you propose.
jlgaddis 12y ago
I recall reading here on HN recently something about CloudFlare having their own internal CA infrastructure. I would expect them to allow customers to start generating certificates (signed by their internal CA) that they can deploy on the origin server.
zaroth 12y ago
Personally, I was really hoping the backend connection would be secured by spiped, cutting the unnecessary complexity of TLS and certificate validation completely out of it. That might exclude Windows servers (until someone ports it), and maybe harder in some cases to setup.

deanclatworthy 12y ago

I just got the popup, clicked "okay" and when I go to "Cloudflare settings", it's still only available to select SSL options for the paid plans. For those who haven't yet seen the popup there's a bit more info here: https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl#universal_ssl https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl#universal_ssl It's a pity that I got the message saying it was available on my account, when the setting is not yet activated :)

pencoyd 12y ago
Working on that. Lots and lots of certs to issue. Seeing about making message "smarter" (checking your individual status) if possible.
tokenizerrr 12y ago
Just had the exact same experience, this is still great though. Looking forward to enabling SSL on my site (at no cost).
jgrahamc 12y ago
Yes, sorry about that. We're rushing to set up certificates for everyone who uses CloudFlare.
- deanclatworthy 12y ago
  Understandable. I've waited months since you first teased about this. I can wait a few more hours ;-)

edent 12y ago

Interestingly, I just tried to visit one of my CloudFlare protected sites. Shoving https in front of the URL results in this error in Firefox & Chrome. dabr.eu uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for the following names: ssl2000.cloudflare.com, .redpitt.mobi, redpitt.mobi, cloudflare.com, .cloudflare.com So I assume it isn't quite as seamless / automated as it makes out? edit ah - a little further reading says it will roll out over the next few days.

jgrahamc 12y ago
Your cert hasn't been issued yet. We are in the processing of issuing 2 million certs. You got a default cert that's sort of a 'catch all'. When that goes away your domain will have been issued a real cert.
- edent 12y ago
  Faster man! Faster! :-) Thanks for doing this - such an excellent initiative.
  - jgrahamc 12y ago
    Since you ask so nicely I had your domain bumped up in the queue.
    - jgrahamc 12y ago
      And now... $ curl -v https://dabr.eu * Adding handle: conn: 0x7faa1c000000 * Adding handle: send: 0 * Adding handle: recv: 0 * Curl_addHandleToPipeline: length: 1 * - Conn 0 (0x7faa1c000000) send_pipe: 1, recv_pipe: 0 * About to connect() to dabr.eu port 443 (#0) * Trying 104.28.21.97... * Connected to dabr.eu (104.28.21.97) port 443 (#0) * TLS 1.2 connection using TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 * Server certificate: sni10021.cloudflaressl.com * Server certificate: COMODO ECC Domain Validation Secure Server CA 2 * Server certificate: COMODO ECC Certification Authority * Server certificate: AddTrust External CA Root > GET / HTTP/1.1 > User-Agent: curl/7.30.0 > Host: dabr.eu > Accept: */*

endijs 12y ago

Enabled this, but when visiting website over https have error. "You attempted to reach YYYY, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as ssl2000.cloudflare.com. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of YYYY." Looks like things are still in progress and does not work out of the box. Will see what will be in a day or couple.

jgrahamc 12y ago
We are in the process of issuing 2 million certs. Your cert hasn't been issued yet so you are hitting a sort of 'default cert'. Once that error goes away you are set.
- endijs 12y ago
  If i choose to ignore SSL warning I get ERROR 522. But I guess its better now to sit and relax while CF catches up with all this migration.

sarciszewski 12y ago

As I've said on Twitter, I'm excited to see this happen. Not because I think this will help against the NSA, FBI, et al. who are armed with NSLs and FISA letters, but because I believe (hope?) it will set a trend towards making security free for defenders and prohibitively expensive for attackers.

diafygi 12y ago

Will users be able to download their private keys for the provisioned cert? If not, would CloudFlare ever consider provisioning free SSL certs for non-CloudFlare customers (i.e. let us uploade our crt file and you have your CAs sign it)? We desperately need an alternative to StartCom, since many devs don't trust them[1]. I've suggested AOL in another thread[2], but so far I can't find anyone who works there to talk to. EDIT: To be clear, I'm very happy for this release and thanks to CloudFlare for stepping up. [1] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041087#c13 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041087#c13 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374685

thoughtpolice 12y ago
I believe the CEO said in their last post here that certificate pinning and custom certificates (even EV ones) would be supported by their new plans. (Can't remember if you have to pay $$$, though) I imagine it will take a short amount of time after this change to realize that.
andreasvc 12y ago
A private key should never be given to a third party (preferably not even a trusted one), and downloading the private key generated by CloudFlare would also negate the "private" feature. Furthermore, you don't upload a crt (certficate) file for a CA to sign, because that is the result of a CA's signature. You upload a certificate signing request (csr) after having generated a private key on the same machine where the key/certficate will be used; this way you are sure you have never lost control over the private key. With respect to StartCom I don't really see the problem or why anyone would step up to offer something better for free. Certificates are a money making business and with StartCom you get the security you pay for ...

prefork 12y ago

I wonder what happens to certificates if a customer leaves Cloudflare? What keeps revocation lists from ballooning as customers "try out" the service?

cmircea 12y ago
OCSP?

ancarda 12y ago

Once IPv6 is a bit more popular, will CloudFlare use a unique IP per customer to get around SNI or will it still be used on IPv6? It seems a bit like NAT; something that can safely die once IPv4 is gone.

snewman 12y ago
According to the article, they are already doing that.
- ancarda 12y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out, I seemed to have missed it.
psykovsky 12y ago
So, you want NAT to die, but apparently you forget that NAT is what protects most domestic computers from intrusion, not anti-virus or software firewalls. It will be fun...
- ancarda 12y ago
  I'm aware a lot of people use NAT as a cheap firewall. I suspect decent home routers will have a basic firewall for IPv6, even if it just works based on ports.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  That use of NAT can trivially be replaced by an everything-out nothing-in firewall.
  - psykovsky 12y ago
    You expect technologically illiterate people to magically be able to protect themselves when they couldn't before?
- X-Istence 12y ago
  NAT is not security.

Xdes 12y ago

There's a nice red and green map that colorblind people cannot see.

voidlogic 12y ago

I'm sure small ISP's that run transparent caches are really excited about this...

rietta 12y ago

This is very welcome news from my point of view as a developer and security consultant, enough that I blogged about it first thing this morning at http://rietta.com/blog/2014/09/29/universal-ssl-with-cloudflare/ http://rietta.com/blog/2014/09/29/universal-ssl-with-cloudfl.... There are industries where off-premises key management is not appropriate and certainly not a trusted man-in-the-middle by a third-party vendor. For these organizations, having any party be in the position to be able to intercept communications is a total no-go. But for a lot of the internet community that is not the primary threat to model. Rather its inertia that prevents SSL from being set up in the first place because it is seen as either expensive, hard, or somehow unnecessary. For these circumstances, protecting users from criminal surveillance at the local coffee shop and from content manipulation by unscrupulous, unaccountable cable internet service providers is a very good thing. I have clients who I will advise to pass on this based upon their threat model and others for whom this is a great option. For my own blog, this is perfect too. It's about knowing your threat model and choosing the appropriate countermeasures accordingly.

rang 12y ago

Good job cloudflare for finally keeping up with the industry. Cloudfront, for example, already supports universal ssl and SNI

LewisJEllis 12y ago
Cloudflare has offered SSL & SNI for paid customers for ages. You're missing the point.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
xxdesmus 12y ago
yeah, no. We've offered SSL for 4 years now. This is entirely different. Cloudfront, for example, doesn't give you SSL for free.
- rang 12y ago
  Customers have to pay for dedicated ipv4 address space. There's no way around that. SNI should be free as they don't require dedicated IPs. But it doesn't look like that was the case for cloudflare

akama 12y ago

One of the little things here is the use of SPDY. I'm not sure how feel about this change. On one hand it will save a great deal of resources, but it will make the protocol more unapproachable. Is this a change that the web needs to make?

brokentone 12y ago

One possibly negative outcome of this could be SEO related. In my research thus far, Google has suggested that HTTPS _could_ increase your ranking to a very small degree, but the question is whether they consider this duplicate content.

arikrak 12y ago

This is a major (and long-planned) move on CloudFlare's part. They're going to lose money in the short-term, since the primary reason many small-to-medium-sized sites upgrade to CloudFlare Pro is to get SSL support. Many other sites will now switch to CloudFlare to get instant (partial) SSL. CloudFlare isn't a charity so they'll need to introduce new features or limits to get people to upgrade to pro. Though they may get enough enough revenue from their partner one-click apps to offset their costs.

general_failure 12y ago

This is silly. SSL is supposed to be a secure conversation between the website and the end user. No one else is between. Encouraging these things is detrimental to internet. In fact, I would go ahead and say: * Make browser self-signed certs less scarier * Make users more accustomed and knowledgable of self-signed certs. Browser vendors and corporations need to work together to make the above happen.

RadioactiveMan 12y ago
Consider the discussion taking place in other comments - SSL has never guaranteed a conversation between client and a server at the "end". The concept of one server at the end of your connection is wrong. Often, you'll be connected to a load balancer that terminates SSL and communicates with other servers over plain text. Or, you might reach an HTTP server that communicates with other services ( perhaps a database ) and you have no guarantee that those connections are over SSL or take place on internal networks ( as if internal would make it more secure ). Besides SSL itself and the serving of your particular request, what else is being done with the information you've sent? Perhaps they're storing data or sharing it in ways you would not approve of. Trusting the services you connect to is the real tough problem and it has little to do with SSL.

igouss 12y ago

Can somebody explain to me 1) why SSL certificats are so expensive 2) Why do they have to expire?

spydum 12y ago
1) theoretically, it's essentially the background check the CA's perform to ensure you are you 2) to ensure you still are you, and to setup a nice recurring revenue stream for the CA's :) (err it probably has something to do with security)
mike_hearn 12y ago
1) They are not, really. You can get free DV certs from StartSSL. Other types of certs do cost money because issuing them involves real work. I don't know how else to explain it. Go look at the list of things a CA has to do to be considered trustable by the major root store operators (operating system vendors, browser makers). It's not trivial. 2) The original reason was because it was assumed (correctly) that due to hardware improvements keys that were previously strong would become weak. So it was supposed to encode a length of time after which the cert owner would be forced to re-evaluate key strength. Nowadays the browser makers are tending to lean on CAs to push expiry times downwards so they expire quicker, the reason being that updating the SSL ecosystem often requires new features or changes in certificates, and if certs can last 5 years then it means a full upgrade takes 5 years, whereas if certs expire after one year then one year after deployment begins everyone is updated. Pretty big difference. It's for this reason that EV certs are specced to expire after a year: it means standards can be revved quicker.

damonpace 12y ago

Congrats to CF on this. The day has come where all domains & subdomains should automatically be SSL encrypted for free. CF is building the Internet as it should have been built in the first place. I love that they are doing this.

notastartup 12y ago

so how does this differ from the paid plan? I mean the only reason I am paying is because of SSL and now it's free?

kijin 12y ago
The SSL on free plans is only compatible with newer clients. The SSL on paid plans is compatible with all clients, such as IE on XP, Android 2.x, and slightly outdated HTTP wrappers for most programming languages.
- notastartup 12y ago
  will the ssl be available on Chrome 37? by newer clients what versions of browser exactly?
  - kijin 12y ago
    https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl#browsers https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl#browsers

danielsju6 12y ago

So they put a lot of effort into promoting SNI. A potential gotcha to consider, especially for peeps on HN; SNI isn't supported by a lot of Android, including the default download manager and parts of the networking stack—that bit me recently in development. At least as far back as 4.4.0.