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Everything on the web starts with a domain name. It is the foundation on which a company’s online presence is built. If that foundation is compromised, the damage can be immense.
As part of CIO Week, we looked at all the biggest risks that companies continue to face online, and how we could address them. The compromise of a domain name remains one of the greatest. There are many ways in which a domain may be hijacked or otherwise compromised, all the way up to the most serious: losing control of your domain name altogether.
You don’t want it to happen to you. Imagine not just losing your website, but all your company’s email, a myriad of systems tied to your corporate domain, and who knows what else. Having an attacker compromise your corporate domain is the stuff of nightmares for every CIO. And, if you’re a CIO and it’s not something you’re worrying about, know that we literally surveyed every other domain registrar and were so unsatisfied with their security practices we needed to launch our own.
But, now that we have, we want to make domain compromise something that should never, ever happen again. For that reason, we’re excited to announce that we are extending a new level of domain record protection to all our Enterprise customers. We call it Cloudflare Domain Protection, and we’re including it for free for every Cloudflare Enterprise customer. For those customers who have domains secured by Domain Protection, we will also waive all registration and renewal fees on those domains. Cloudflare Domain Protection will be available in Q1 — you can speak to your account manager now to take advantage of the offer.
It’s not possible to build a truly secure domain registrar solution without an understanding of how a domain gets compromised. Before we get into more details of our offering, we wanted to take you on a tour of how a domain can get compromised.
Stealing the Keys to Your Kingdom
There are three types of domain compromises that we often hear about. Let’s take a look at each of them.
Domain Transfers
One of the most serious compromises is an unauthorized transfer of the domain to another registrar. While cooperation amongst registrars has improved greatly over the years, it can still be very difficult to recover a stolen domain. It can often take weeks — or even months. It may require legal action. In a best case scenario, the domain may be recovered in a few days; in the worst case, you may never get it back.
The ability to easily transfer a domain between registrars is vitally important, and is part of what keeps the market for domain registration competitive. However, it also introduces potential risk. The transfer process used by most registries involves using a token to authorize the transfer. Prior to the widespread practice of redacting publicly accessible whois data, an email approval process was also used. To steal a domain, a malicious actor only needs to gain access to the authorization code and be able to remove any domain locks.
Unauthorized transfers start often with a compromised account. In many cases, the customer may have their account credentials compromised. In other cases, attackers use elaborate social engineering schemes to take control of the domain, often moving the domain between registrar accounts before transferring the domain to another registrar.
Name Server Updates
Name server updates are another way in which domains may be compromised. Whereas a domain transfer is typically an attempt to permanently take over a domain, a name server update is more temporary in nature. However, even if the update can usually be quickly reversed, these types of domain hijacks can be very damaging. They open the possibility of stolen customer data and intercepted email traffic. But most of all: they open an organization up to very serious reputational damage.
Domain Suspensions and Deletions
Most domain suspensions and deletions are not the result of malicious activity, but rather, they often happen through human error or system failures. In many cases, the customer forgets to renew a domain or neglects to update their payment method. In other cases, the registrar mistakenly suspends or deletes a domain.
Regardless of the reason though: the result is a domain that no longer resolves.
While these are certainly not the only ways in which domains may be compromised, they are some of the most damaging. We have spent a lot of time focused on these types of compromises and how to prevent them from happening.
A Different Approach to Domains
Like a lot of folks, we’ve long been frustrated by the state of the domain business. And so this isn’t our first rodeo here.
We already have a registrar service — Cloudflare Registrar — which is open to any Cloudflare customer. We make it super easy to get started, to integrate with Cloudflare, and there’s no markup on our pricing — we promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges. The aim: no more "bait and switch" and “endless upsell” (which, according to our customers, are the two most common terms associated with the domain industry). Instead, it’s a registrar that you love. Obviously, it’s Cloudflare, so we incorporated a number of security best practices into how it operates, too.
For our most demanding enterprise customers, we also have Custom Domain Protection. Every client using Custom Domain Protection defines their own process for updating records. As we said when we introduced it: “if a Custom Domain Protection client wants us to not change their domain records unless six different individuals call us, in order, from a set of predefined phone numbers, each reading multiple unique pass codes, and telling us their favorite ice cream flavor, on a Tuesday that is also a full moon, we will enforce that. Literally.”
Yes, it’s secure, but it’s also not the most scalable solution. As a result, we charge a premium for it. As we spoke to our Enterprise customers, however, there was a need for something in between — a Goldilocks solution, so to speak, that offers a high level of protection without being quite so custom.
Enter Cloudflare Domain Protection.
A Triple-Locked Approach
Our approach to securing domains with Domain Protection is quite straightforward: identify the various attack vectors, and design a layered security mode to address each potential threat.
Before we take a look at each security layer, it’s important to understand the relationship between registrars and registries, and how that impacts domain security. You can think of registries as the wholesaler of domain names. They manage the central database of all registered domains within the Top-Level-Domain (TLD). They are also responsible for determining the wholesale pricing and establishing TLD specific policies.
Registrars, on the other hand, are the retailer of domains and are responsible for selling the domains to the end user. With each registration, transfer, or renewal, the registrar pays the registry a transaction fee.
Registrars and registries jointly manage domain registrations in what’s called the Shared Registration System (SRS). Registrars communicate with registries using an IETF standard called the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP). Embodied in the EPP standard are a set of domain status that can be applied by registrars and registries to lock the domain and prevent updates, deletions, and transfers (to another registrar).
Registrars are able to apply “client” locks, frequently referred to as Registrar Locks. Registries apply “server” locks, also known as Registry Locks. It’s important to note that the registry locks always supersede the registrar locks. This means that the registrar locks cannot be removed until the registry locks have been removed.
Now, let’s take a closer look at our planned approach.
We start by applying the EPP Registrar Locks to the domain name. These are the EPP client locks that prevent domain updates, transfers, and deletions.
We then apply an internal lock that prevents any API calls to that domain from being processed. This lock functions outside of EPP and is designed to protect the domain should the EPP locks be removed, as well as situations where an operation may be executed outside of EPP. For example, in some TLDs the domain contact data is only stored at the registrar and never transmitted to the registry. In these cases, it’s important to have a non EPP locking mechanism.
After the registrar locks are applied, we will request the registry to apply the Registry Locks using a special non-EPP based procedure. It’s important to note that not all registries offer Registry Lock as a service. In some instances, we may not be able to apply this last locking feature.
Lastly, a secure verification procedure is created to handle any future requests to unlock or modify the domain.
Included Out of the Box
Our aim is to make Cloudflare Domain Protection the most scalable secure solution for domains that’s available. We want to ensure that the domains that matter most to our customers — the mission critical, high value domains — are securely protected.
Eligible domains that are explicitly included under a Cloudflare Enterprise contract may be included in our Domain Protection registration service at no additional cost. And, as we mentioned earlier, this will also cover registration and renewal fees — so not only will securing your domain be one less thing for you to worry about, so too will be paying for it.
Interested in applying Cloudflare Domain Protection to your domain names? Reach out to your account manager and let them know you’re interested. Additional details will be coming in early Q1, 2022.