On July 8, 2022, a massive outage at Rogers, one of Canada’s largest telecom providers, knocked out Internet and mobile services for over 12 million users. Why did this single event have such a catastrophic impact? And more importantly, why do some networks crumble in the face of disruption while others barely stumble? The answer […]
Tag Archives: research
Making the Internet observable: the evolution of Cloudflare Radar
The Internet is constantly changing in ways that are difficult to see. How do we measure its health, spot new threats, and track the adoption of new technologies? When we launched Cloudflare Radar in 2020, our goal was to illuminate the Internet’s patterns, helping anyone understand what was happening from a security, performance, and usage […]
From .com to .anything: introducing Top-Level Domain (TLD) insights on Cloudflare Radar
Readers of a certain age may remember the so-called “dot com boom” that took place in the early 2000’s. The boom’s “dot com” is what is known as a Top-Level Domain (TLD). Originally intended to organize domain names into a small set of categorical groupings, over the past 40+ years, the set of TLDs has […]
Data at Cloudflare scale: some insights on measurement for 1,111 interns
Cloudflare recently announced our goal to hire 1,111 interns in 2026 — that’s equivalent to about 25% of our full-time workforce. This means countless opportunities to develop and ship working code into production. It also creates novel opportunities to measure aspects of the Internet that are otherwise hard to observe — and more difficult still […]
Improving the trustworthiness of Javascript on the Web
The web is the most powerful application platform in existence. As long as you have the right API, you can safely run anything you want in a browser. Well… anything but cryptography. It is as true today as it was in 2011 that Javascript cryptography is Considered Harmful. The main problem is code distribution. Consider […]
Automatically Secure: how we upgraded 6,000,000 domains by default to get ready for the Quantum Future
The Internet is in constant motion. Sites scale, traffic shifts, and attackers adapt. Security that worked yesterday may not be enough tomorrow. That’s why the technologies that protect the web — such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and emerging post-quantum cryptography (PQC) — must also continue to evolve. We want to make sure that everyone […]
You don’t need quantum hardware for post-quantum security
Organizations have finite resources available to combat threats, both by the adversaries of today and those in the not-so-distant future that are armed with quantum computers. In this post, we provide guidance on what to prioritize to best prepare for the future, when quantum computers become powerful enough to break the conventional cryptography that underpins […]
Message Signatures are now part of our Verified Bots Program, simplifying bot authentication
As a site owner, how do you know which bots to allow on your site, and which you’d like to block? Existing identification methods rely on a combination of IP address range (which may be shared by other services, or change over time) and user-agent header (easily spoofable). These have limitations and deficiencies. In our […]
Orange Me2eets: We made an end-to-end encrypted video calling app and it was easy
Developing a new video conferencing application often begins with a peer-to-peer setup using WebRTC, facilitating direct data exchange between clients. While effective for small demonstrations, this method encounters scalability hurdles with increased participants. The data transmission load for each client escalates significantly in proportion to the number of users, as each client is required to […]
A next-generation Certificate Transparency log built on Cloudflare Workers
Any public certification authority (CA) can issue a certificate for any website on the Internet to allow a webserver to authenticate itself to connecting clients. Take a moment to scroll through the list of trusted CAs for your web browser (e.g., Chrome). You may recognize (and even trust) some of the names on that list, […]
