The Quantum Threat Most of today’s cryptography is designed to be secure against an adversary with enormous amounts of computational power. This means estimating how much work certain computations (such as factoring a number, or finding a discrete logarithm) require, and choosing cryptographic parameters based on our best estimate of how much work would be […]
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The WireX Botnet: How Industry Collaboration Disrupted a DDoS Attack
Introduction On August 17th, 2017, multiple Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and content providers were subject to significant attacks from a botnet dubbed WireX. The botnet is named for an anagram for one of the delimiter strings in its command and control protocol. The WireX botnet comprises primarily Android devices running malicious applications and is designed […]
Advancing Privacy Protection with the GDPR
A game-changer The road towards implementation of the new European GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation) has been a long one, even though public awareness of its impact, especially outside of Europe, is only now really starting to take hold. This game-changing piece of EU legislation will require companies to fundamentally change how they process […]
App Highlight: Hardenize
Hardenize is a comprehensive security tool that continuously monitors the security and configuration of your domain name, email, and website. Ivan Ristić, the author of Hardenize, gave a demo of his app at our Cloudflare London HQ. Do you know how secure your site is? View a Hardenize report on your website by clicking this […]
Broken packets: IP fragmentation is flawed
As opposed to the public telephone network, the internet has a Packet Switched design. But just how big can these packets be? CC BY 2.0 image by ajmexico, inspired by This is an old question and the IPv4 RFCs answer it pretty clearly. The idea was to split the problem into two separate concerns: What […]
How to use Cloudflare for Service Discovery
Cloudflare runs 3,588 containers, making up 1,264 apps and services that all need to be able to find and discover each other in order to communicate — a problem solved with service discovery. You can use Cloudflare for service discovery. By deploying microservices behind Cloudflare, microservices’ origins are masked, secured from DDoS and L7 exploits […]
Aquele Abraço Rio de Janeiro: Cloudflare’s 116th Data Center!
Cloudflare is excited to announce our newest data center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This is our eighth data center in South America, and expands the Cloudflare network to 116 cities across 57 countries. Our newest deployment will improve the performance and security of over six million Internet applications across Brazil, while providing redundancy to […]
Ninth Circuit Rules on National Security Letter Gag Orders
As we’ve previously discussed on this blog, Cloudflare has been challenging for years the constitutionality of the FBI’s use of national security letters (NSLs) to demand user data on a confidential basis. On Monday morning, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals released the latest decision in our lawsuit, and endorsed […]
High-reliability OCSP stapling and why it matters
At Cloudflare our focus is making the internet faster and more secure. Today we are announcing a new enhancement to our HTTPS service: High-Reliability OCSP stapling. This feature is a step towards enabling an important security feature on the web: certificate revocation checking. Reliable OCSP stapling also improves connection times by up to 30% in […]
How to make your site HTTPS-only
The Internet is getting more secure every day as people enable HTTPS, the secure version of HTTP, on their sites and services. Last year, Mozilla reported that the percentage of requests made by Firefox using encrypted HTTPS passed 50% for the first time. HTTPS has numerous benefits that are not available over unencrypted HTTP, including […]

