A little over a year ago, Nick Sullivan talked about the beginning of the end for AES-CBC cipher suites, following a plethora of attacks on this cipher mode. Today we can safely confirm that this prediction is coming true, as for the first time ever the share of AES-CBC cipher
HPACK: the silent killer (feature) of HTTP/2
If you have experienced HTTP/2 for yourself, you are probably aware of the visible performance gains possible with HTTP/2 due to features like stream multiplexing, explicit stream dependencies, and Server Push. There is however one important feature that is not obvious to the eye. This is the HPACK
Announcing Support for HTTP/2 Server Push
Last November, we rolled out HTTP/2 support for all our customers. At the time, HTTP/2 was not in wide use, but more than 88k of the Alexa 2 million websites are now HTTP/2-enabled. Today, more than 70% of sites that use HTTP/2 are served via CloudFlare.
It takes two to ChaCha (Poly)
Not long ago we introduced support for TLS cipher suites based on the ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD, for all our customers. Back then those cipher suites were only supported by the Chrome browser and Google's websites, but were in the process of standardization. We introduced these cipher suites to give end users
Results of experimenting with Brotli for dynamic web content
Compression is one of the most important tools CloudFlare has to accelerate website performance. Compressed content takes less time to transfer, and consequently reduces load times. On expensive mobile data plans, compression even saves money for consumers. However, compression is not free—it comes at a price. It is one
Doubling the speed of jpegtran with SIMD
It is no secret that at CloudFlare we put a great effort into accelerating our customers' websites. One way to do it is to reduce the size of the images on the website. This is what our Polish product is for. It takes various images and makes them smaller using
Fighting Cancer: The Unexpected Benefit Of Open Sourcing Our Code
Recently I was contacted by Dr. Igor Kozin from The Institute of Cancer Research in London. He asked about the optimal way to compile CloudFlare's open source fork of zlib. It turns out that zlib is widely used to compress the SAM/BAM files that are used for DNA sequencing.
Go crypto: bridging the performance gap
It is no secret that we at CloudFlare love Go. We use it, and we use it a LOT. There are many things to love about Go, but what I personally find appealing is the ability to write assembly code! CC BY 2.0 image by Jon Curnow That is