Nearly every website today seems to be hosted behind Cloudflare which is really concerning for the future of privacy on the internet.
Cloudflare no doubt logs, stores, and correlates network telemetry that can be used for a wide array of deanonymization attacks. Not only that, but Cloudflare acts as a man-in-the-middle for all encrypted traffic which means that not even TLS will prevent Cloudflare from snooping on you. Their position across the internet also lends them the ability to conduct netflow and traffic correlation attacks.
Even my proposed solution to use archive.org as a proxy is not a valid solution since I found out today that archive.org is also hosted behind Cloudflare… edit: i was wrong
So what options do we even have? What privacy concerns did I miss, and are there any workaround solutions?
Cf only acts as a mitm for encrypted traffic if you choose it in the options. If you provide your own cert then they can’t decrypt anything.
Has avoiding Cloudflare become Impossible?
Mostly, yes. But let’s break this down. Cloudflare only breaks web services and so far Cloudflare’s privacy abuses and gate-keeping is mostly confined to the web. Avoiding Cloudflare is impossible in some circumstances.
CFd government sites are unavoidable (voting rights lost in the US)
The only Cloudflare sites that are strictly unavoidable AFAICT are government sites. You can always boycott the private sector, but the public sector is shoved down our throats. There are 6 or so states in the US where voter registration goes through Cloudflare. Even if you register on paper there is still no escape because the data entry worker likely uses the Cloudflare site. I am a non-voter for this reason. Although it’s still possible to move to one of the 44 other states and register there.
CFd medical websites
See How lack of digital rights, Cloudflare, and Google worsened a medical emergency situation and undermined human rights. When you need medical info in a hurry, boycotting is tough.
search is liberated – but only by 1 single search service to date
There is only one general purpose search service that helps avoid Cloudflare: Ombrelo, which tags and down-ranks Cloudflare websites in the results.
What’s your threat model? Adjust accordingly.
The situation is, what it is, but there’s a wide range of actions one can take that fall between the two poles of do nothing and burn all internet enabled devices.
Stupid Question:
How do I find out if a website I use is hosted over cloudflare? The noscipt javascript blocker extension shows in some cases I blocked some cloudflare javascript. For example on the lemmy.world instance it shows a script labeled “cloudflareinsights.com” that I block. That apparently provides visitor analytics
According to them on insights:
Our edge sees all requests made to a website, regardless of whether it’s cached or uncached, the user has adblock, or they turned off JavaScript. This enables us to […]
On other sites it shows a “confirm you are human” check-box labeled with the cloudflare brand (if I activate javascript for that site) – according to cloudflare wikipedia that service is known as Cloudflare Turnstile. This is how I currently see if cloudflare is involved.
Another interesting thing I noticed on stackoverflow is email protected which confirms to me stackexchange also uses cloudflare somehow.
I guess you could detect a Reverse Proxy by cloudflare based on its IP-Adress ~ but I do not really know how to look that up perhaps the following stack overflow answer might help using the tools
nslookupandwhois… Any other hints on this?nslookup www.monero.townwhois -h whois.arin.net n <IP-Adress from prev command> | egrep 'Organization'VPN. Tor. Those are basic tools for relative anonymity.
I don’t think it’s possible to avoid companies like Cloudflare, AWS, Akamai, etc. Or not without a whole lot of effort that isn’t really reasonable and would severely degrade user experience. They provide what’s become fundamental infrastructure to the internet, and that doesn’t seem likely to change.
It is possible to avoid Cloudflare (the worst offender), proven by instances that are run by more competent experts. For example:
- fedia.io
- sopuli.xyz
- beehaw.org
- infosec.pub
- lemmy.dbzer0.com
- slrpnk.net
- links.hackliberty.org
- lemmy.ml ← used to be Cloudflare-proxied but they got wiser
- mander.xyz
^ Those are good instances where users’ traffic is not recklessly exposed to Cloudflare.
These instances below not only expose their users to Cloudflare, but they’re not even decent enough to inform their own users about it:
- lemmy.world ← Cloudflare
- sh.itjust.works ← Cloudflare
- zerobytes.monster ← Cloudflare
- lemmy.ca ← Cloudflare
- lemm.ee ← Cloudflare
- programming.dev ← Cloudflare
- lemmy.zip ← Cloudflare
If you probe admins of the above list, some will say in effect that they regret pawning all their users to CF but claim they have no choice - that they do not know how to defend from attack. Some admins have no regrets and simply do not give a shit. Many admins are actually ignorant to the extent of not even knowing Cloudflare sees the traffic (yes, many times admins were appalled to learn this from me; who to them is just some random pleb). Probably the most despicable aspect to this is that no Cloudflare admin is socially responsible enough to post a banner msg making sure users are informed about their exposure. If they are proud of their choice and feel they have no choice, then why neglect to disclose it (esp. on a non-profit activity)?
Regardless of their reasons/excuses, it really does not matter to the user. What matters to users is that there are privacy-disrespecting choices and relatively privacy-respecting choices. Obviously street-wise users select from the first list I posted and not the 2nd list.
Only CFd government sites are unavoidable
The only Cloudflare sites that are unavoidable AFAICT are government sites. You can always boycott the private sector, but there are 6 or so states in the US where voter registration goes through Cloudflare. Even if you register on paper, the data entry worker likely goes to the Cloudflare site. I became a non-voter for this reason.
ironically monero.town also uses Cloudflare.
Even my proposed solution to use archive.org as a proxy is not a valid solution since I found out today that archive.org is also hosted behind Cloudflare…
Yikes! Can you give more detail? I’ve used archive.org quite heavily for years (it’s the only practical universal escape from Cloudflare). The IP address is not in Cloudflare’s range. But recently Cloudflare as started hiding its own presence by outsourcing to 3rd parties. It’s a vast minority of cases but this could obviously worsen. Is archive.org using CF through one of the undisclosed 3rd parties? A couple years ago archive.org announced a disturbing partnership with CF but did not disclose the details.
Upon further investigation, I mistook original cloudflare headers that were passed through with x-archive-orig-* as an indication that archive.org was behind cloudflare. my mistake. I have edited the original post.
How is Cloudflare able to decrypt TLS traffic?
The long answer is here.
The short answer: Cloudflare holds the TLS keys and terminates the tunnel. The padlock misleads people because they think that means the tunnel goes all the way to the server hosting the source website.
Note as well that you are using lemmy.zip, a Cloudflared instance. CF sees your IP address, username, password (unhashed) and everything you do. (edit: See this comment for alternatives).
