CloudFlare enabling free SSL by mid-October

CloudFlare enabling free SSL by mid-October(blog.cloudflare.com)

154 points by moonboots 11 years ago | 61 comments

nilved 11 years ago |

Please note that using Cloudflare, even with free SSL, is not an increase to the security and privacy of your users. On the contrary, Cloudflare records information about your users (this cannot be disabled) and, by default, blocks users who attempt to view your site through privacy-enhancing software. I would suggest that people looking to install SSL on their website (this should be everybody) instead get their free SSL certificate from gandi.net or StartSSL, who do not spy on or block your users.

rdl 11 years ago | |

I assume you are referring to Tor? We love Tor and the specific things we block by default are resource consumption bots. If people enable. "I Am Under Attack" mode , I think there is some incidental interstitial challenge for Tor, but not blocked.

We don't comment on our customers unless they authorize us to, but based on the list of public ones, I would be pretty comfortable, even if I didn't work there.

oceanstone 11 years ago | | |

Anyone here can test nilved's claim easily enough. Just visit Hacker News using Tor or a VPN, since the site uses Cloudflare.

Side note: Your announcement is really exciting.

monokrome 11 years ago | |

So, you're saying that using HTTP instead of HTTPS doesn't increase the privacy of users? I'd say that it does "increase" the privacy, although nobody is saying that it fixes every hole in the boat...

nilved 11 years ago | | |

Speaking strictly, you're right, but when you consider (a) Cloudflare's connection to your server is insecure (b) Cloudflare is listening in on every request (c) Cloudflare blocks VPN and Tor users, it doesn't seem like such an obvious decision. But that's a false dichotomy, since everybody should use HTTPS, nobody should use HTTP, and, most importantly, nobody should be okay with third-parties snooping on your users.

spindritf 11 years ago | |

Yes, it worries me that Cloudflare is proxying an ever larger number of websites I visit. It is not so easy to dump Cloudflare when you need it though. They mitigate DDoS attacks, handle large volume traffic. I think moot even said that he'd have to close 4chan if it wasn't for Cloudflare.

stevenh 11 years ago | | |

Cloudflare hosts and defends the sites of numerous DDoS-for-pay services and they refuse to take them down.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/the-new-normal-200-400-gb...

"[The DDoS-for-pay] industry probably would destroy itself without Cloudflare’s protection, and furthermore ... some might perceive a credibility issue with a company that sells DDoS protection services providing safe haven to an entire cottage industry of DDoS-for-hire services."

namidark 11 years ago | |

Gandi is free for a year and then expensive after - Namecheap may not be free but renewals and initial costs are much lower. StartSSL is free but revoke-ing costs money.

nly 11 years ago | | |

Revoking StartSSL is only $25. If you go 3 years without needing revocation then you're ahead of paying Namecheap or anyone else for basic domain validation.

tuneladora 11 years ago | | |

Namecheap vs Gandi is like 6.5 vs 12 EUR. Yes is almost double, but I don't know if I would consider them as cheap and "expensive".

Ecio78 11 years ago | | |

just checked now, Gandi is 40€/yr, not that expensive compared to big names like Verisign & co. I have used in the past RapidSSL, but it is same price, 50$/yr. I've just checked Namecheap and it's reselling other SSL like Comodo or Geotrust, but it looks less expensive, so yes, probably it's the best price.

user3 11 years ago |

Most of the websites wont encrypt the link from Cloudflare to the server, ultimately defeating the purpose of SSL aside from a better search ranking.

igul222 11 years ago | |

It's not a problem if those connections use self-signed certificates, right? If that's the case, then setting up SSL from CloudFlare to your servers should be pretty easy.

agwa 11 years ago | | |

It would be free, but not necessarily easy, as it would still entail configuring your web server to use SSL, and that might not even be an option if you're using shared hosting.

(Aside: self signed certs don't protect the connection from active attacks unless CloudFlare pins the cert. I'm mainly concerned with passive eavesdropping though.)

guyht 11 years ago | |

Could you elaborate on this. My impression was that connections between data centres (e.g. in the case of using an EC2 instance with Cloudflare) were already very secure and therefore do not require SSL.

eli 11 years ago | | |

Depends what you're trying to protect against. Those links are notably very insecure against the NSA.

mmohebbi 11 years ago | | |

Agree with others that it depends on what you are trying to protect against. It's also worth reading through the options that Cloudflare supports for origin server communication:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-strict-ssl-protecting...

ihsw 11 years ago | |

What's the difference between this and using AWS ELB for HTTPS termination?

simpleigh 11 years ago | | |

Communication from CloudFlare to your server is over the open Internet, whereas that from an ELB to an EC2 instance is within Amazon's datacentre.

donavanm 11 years ago |

Are there more actual implementation details somewhere? Sounds like selecting the ssl context based on the clients SNI request. This (obviously) would predicate client SNI support, as opposed to anycast IPs or similar.

moonboots 11 years ago | |

CloudFlare's CEO says that free SSL will use SNI with ipv4 [1] and possibly non-SNI with ipv6 [2]. A CloudFlare engineer has discussed splitting the SSL handshake between servers so their many edge nodes don't need to keep customer secret keys in memory [3]. However, this sounds slightly different than the lazy loading behavior in the blog post.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7910849

[2] https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/478369486643658754

[3] http://www.slideshare.net/cloudflare/running-secure-server-s...

asdfaoeu 11 years ago | | |

Non-SNI over ipv6 seems pretty pointless since anything supporting ipv6 is going to have sni anyway.

indutny 11 years ago | |

I believe you could use node.js or https://github.com/indutny/bud for asynchronously selecting SNI context per request. This is very fast and flexible.

alanbyrne 11 years ago |

Does it bother anyone else that when you try to visit the Google post explaining that they are using HTTPs as a ranking signal via https it redirects to http?

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-...

general_failure 11 years ago |

Do not announce things until done. This is just shameless marketing stunt.

junto 11 years ago |

I presume that customer private keys need to be stored on Cloudflare servers to implement this. Has that just made Cloudflare servers a legitimate prime NSA target?

I.e. all your keys belong to us

rdl 11 years ago | |

We have a product, "keyless ssl", which is used by some customers to retain on premise custody of their asymmetric key material, actually.

taksintik 11 years ago |

Cloudflare throwing it down with authority...well played. In the end the consumer really doesn't give a hoot. They want simple.

tanglesome 11 years ago |

Why are people up-voting an ad?

willu 11 years ago |

Are EV certs going to remain Business/Enterprise-only?

eastdakota 11 years ago | |

No.

daveslash 11 years ago | | |

I would have guessed EV certs to remain business only. Well, perhaps not business only, but still requiring additional validation. How do you believe EV will be handled? Thanks!

EDIT: I didn't realize you represented cloud-flare. I'm genuinely curious how EV certs will work. Thanks!

tuananh 11 years ago |

CloudFlare is the coolest free CDN out there.

curiousjorge 11 years ago |

what I just paid 20/month for the SSL....

Update: I have another concern I just found out.

For example, I do a lot of web scraping through my domain and I see that I was automatically opted in to use https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/scrapeshield, something that is supposed to block scraping.

There's a huge conflict of interest if it turns out that the cloudflare network actively aims to help block scraping.

I know you guys said you will be on the neutral side but if the cloudflare is helping Scrapeshield become more intelligent about scraping by monitoring my scraping actions, I really don't know if it's wise to stay with cloudflare, as much as I love it.

eastdakota 11 years ago | |

Scrapeshield is a CloudFlare feature. If you don't want it, turn it off. Here's the announcement from when we launched the feature:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-scrapeshield-discover...

eastdakota 11 years ago | |

We'll be adding some cool new features to our paid plans at the same time, so I hope you'll decide to continue paying us the $20.

thoughtpolice 11 years ago | | |

Good to hear - I just signed up and put in the $20 myself (not a very large barrier), and I'm glad features like custom certificates (& other things) will be available as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. CloudFlare seems like a great product so far.

icebraining 11 years ago | |

I don't get it. A domain is just an address, how can you scrape through your domain? Do you mean server? But scrapping is an outbound connection, how could they monitor it?