Beyond what everyone else has said here about it being practically an industry standard now with insane levels of trust, it also foists a lot of the responsibility for security/uptime onto an external company with a good track record. That's great in the eyes of product management and likely the legal department too.
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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The sites I expose to Cloudflare were already being publicly hosted for my friends. Anything actually private or sensitive I run via private DNS and Wireguard internally.
You could say the same about any cloud provider. "AWS can read all my data! The horror!"
You realize your computer can have a backdoor put in place by the brand right? Pretty much same deal isn't it?
OP, what you're describing is not the "big scary MITM" attack vector. It's how TLS/Reverse proxies work. Whether you are using Cloudflare or hosting your own reverse proxy somewhere with full control, it's still terminating TLS at the endpoint and passing back traffic in the clear to the backend.
Some people like Cloudflare for whatever reasons, and that's okay. I host my own reverse proxy out on a VPS and it works just fine.
You'll find that not all of the seflhosted community is super-focused on privacy as say r/privacy is.
Maybe it's my fault for posting this in selfhosted. My question was of a more generic nature about security and privacy in general. You're right, r/privacy might be a better sub for this conversation.
In my case my reverse proxy (nginx) runs on the same machine as my backend. In fact nginx also serves all static data with the backend only serving api requests.
It sounds like you think the issue with a man-in-the-middle attack is the MITM part, not the attack.
Cloudflare is awesome and undervalued in my opinion. They provide dozens of services and charge extremely reasonable pricing.
Outsourcing of (some) risk
If Cloudflare loses the data and it negatively impacts our brand, we can sue the shit out of them.
I'm either reading this wrong or there's a disconnect in knowledge. If you have your own SSL cert and do the termination of that on your end, CF cannot do any MITM without an error on the user's end.
However, if your just setting up an a record or whatever to your server that isn't doing ssl termination, then yes they are mitm
Cloudflares Web Application Firewall or 'WAF' is a reverse proxy that sits in front of your server issuing it's own certs valid for your domain (cloudflare is a CA, and has control over your DNS to get others to issue certs for them). They then provide caching alongside DDOS protection, geoblocking, various customizable firewall settings, as well as just masking your servers ip with their own. This is their primary service aside from just basic DNS/registrar services.
Don’t forget, for selfhosters, the value proposition of free is always pretty strong. I have tiers of data and not everything needs to be super private at all times.
Also...shouldn't we talking more about self-hosting rather than privacy and efficiency issues? I think the topic is a moot point - either you feel that Cloudflare is 'trustworthy'...or you don't.
IMHO, it's sorta like using Google's Gmail for business purposes. Read the fine print - they can do whatever they want with your data, despite their privacy statements. Same goes with Cloudflare. You're using *their* services on *their servers.
They have to lookout for themselves and the risks involved.
Yes by default traffic is only encrypted between cloudflare and users, but you can set it to “full (strict)” and have it end to end encrypted
That's not end to end encryption, it's two seprate ssl connections both terminated at cloudflare. One from client to cloudflare, one from cloudflare to your server. Cloudflare is still a MITM inspecting your traffic in that scenario.
They do however let you disable their proxy(WAF) service, acting as pure DNS so clients connect directly to your IP instead of theirs. But they can at any point toggle that back on and intercept your traffic, nothing really stopping them except morals and T&Cs, but that's not exactly bullet proof. T&Cs can be rewritten and corporations with Morals? Right.....
It comes down to the same line of reasoning that most people are "OK" with using cloud, be it aws, google, oracle, microsoft etc .. Out of laziness and lack of expertise, basically sysadmins are dead. Otherwise it's always a bad idea to offload anything on a third-party specially without transparency (pinky promise)
Badger DAO lost 120M, to this pinky trust. https://www.theblock.co/post/126072/defi-protocol-badgerdao-exploited-for-120-million-in-front-end-attack
Same issue however exists wirh domain name registerers, etc, hence even such a thing as ens.domains are much more trustworthy, and it's much harder to exploit.
Yes. This means they can see your native encrypted self-signed traffic.
Which does not do much. Unless you expose unsecured content to the internet. Please don't.