What do you do when the world’s attention is on you?
03/12/2014
This is a guest post from Rodney Gibbs. Rodney is the CIO of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit media organization that covers public policy, politics, and government. ...
WordPress Pingback Attacks and our WAF
03/11/2014
At CloudFlare a lot of our customers use WordPress, that's why we have our own plugin, we hang out at WordCamp and we wrote a WordPress specific ruleset for our Web Application Firewall....
ECDSA: The digital signature algorithm of a better internet
03/10/2014
This blog post is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Scott Vanstone, popularizer of elliptic curve cryptography and inventor of the ECDSA algorithm. He passed away on March 2, 2014....
It's Go Time on Linux
03/05/2014
Some interesting changes related to timekeeping in the upcoming Go 1.3 release inspired us to take a closer look at how Go programs keep time with the help of the Linux kernel. Timekeeping is a complex topic and determining the current time isn’t as simple as it might seem at first glance....
Introducing lua-capnproto: better serialization in Lua
02/28/2014
When we need to transfer data from one program to another program, either within a machine or from one data center to another some form of serialization is needed....
CloudFlare Publishes Transparency Report for 2013
02/27/2014
On January 27, the Department of Justice and the Director of National Intelligence announced a change in rules governing the disclosure of National Security Orders....
Cloudflare Acquires StopTheHacker
02/24/2014
We're excited to announce that Cloudflare has acquired the anti-malware firm StopTheHacker. I wanted to share a little bit about the rationale behind the acquisition and what to expect from the two teamed up companies going forward....
Good News: Vulnerable NTP Servers Closing Down
02/23/2014
On Monday, February 10th, CloudFlare experienced a large DDoS attack, with nearly 400Gbps of NTP attack traffic hitting our network. ...
Staying up to date with the latest protocols: SPDY/3.1
02/17/2014
Back in June 2012 CloudFlare started a beta rollout of Google's then new SPDY protocol and we took a detailed look at how SPDY makes web sites faster....
Introducing Strict SSL: Protecting Against a On-Path Attack on Origin Traffic
02/14/2014
At CloudFlare, we are always looking for ways to improve the security of our customers’ websites. One of the features we provide is the ability to serve their website encrypted over SSL/TLS. ...
Technical Details Behind a 400Gbps NTP Amplification DDoS Attack
02/13/2014
On Monday we mitigated a large DDoS that targeted one of our customers. The attack peaked just shy of 400Gbps. We've seen a handful of other attacks at this scale, but this is the largest attack we've seen that uses NTP amplification....
Stories from our recent global data center upgrade
01/30/2014
Each day at CloudFlare is full of surprises. As it turns out, it takes a lot of work to stop massive attacks and to help make the web faster. Over the past six months, our entire team has contributed in every way imaginable to more than double the capacity of our global network. ...
CloudFlare DNS is simple, fast and flexible
01/30/2014
Over the past few years, the CloudFlare blog has covered a great range of different topics, drilling down into the technology we use to both protect websites from attack, and optimise them so that they load faster for visitors....
Killing RC4 (softly)
01/29/2014
Back in 2011, the BEAST attack on the cipher block chaining (CBC) encryption mode used in TLS v1.0 was demonstrated. At the time the advice of experts (including our own) was to prioritize the use of RC4-based cipher suites....
CloudFlare Transparency Report on National Security Orders
01/27/2014
Earlier today, the Department of Justice and the Director of National Intelligence announced a change in rules governing the disclosure of National Security Orders, including National Security Letters (NSLs) received by a company. ...
Protect Your Sites With Rapidly Deployed WAF Rules
01/21/2014
An attack on your site could be catastrophic. Even a small attack can have major implications. Responding quickly to an attack is imperative. ...
Moving beyond the DC Circuit Court Decision on the FCC’s Open Internet Order
01/17/2014
CloudFlare is a strong supporter of a free and open Internet. We believe in both fair and free markets and effective regulation to achieve that goal. That is why we read the recent United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit’s opinion in Verizon v. FCC with great interest....
A Day in the Life of a Technical Support Engineer at CloudFlare - Marty Strong, London
01/16/2014
As a Technical Support Engineer I get to work with many different members of the CloudFlare family and with customers from all around the world. Each day is very different to the next, and of course, some days stand out more than others....
Understanding and mitigating NTP-based DDoS attacks
01/09/2014
Over the last couple of weeks you may have been hearing about a new tool in the DDoS arsenal: NTP-based attacks. These have become popular recently and caused trouble for some gaming web sites and service providers....
Bienvenido a Chile: Cloudflare's 24th Data Center Now Live!
01/08/2014
Cue up the fuegos artificiales again! Our data center in Valparaiso, Chile marks the 24th in our global network, our second south of the equator and the first in Latin America. ...
How the NSA (may have) put a backdoor in RSA’s cryptography: A technical primer
01/06/2014
There has been a lot of news lately about nefarious-sounding backdoors being inserted into cryptographic standards and toolkits. One algorithm, a pseudo-random bit generator, Dual_EC_DRBG, was ratified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2007. ...
Welcome 1&1 Internet, CloudFlare’s Newest Optimized Partner!
01/06/2014
On a rainy day back in March 2013, a small team from CloudFlare found ourselves bonding over a beer and a schnitzel in Karlsruhe, Germany — the home of 1&1 Internet. 1&1 is one of the leading hosting companies in the world, the second largest shared host by number of customers. ...
2013: Rebuild the Engine; 2014: Step on the Gas
12/31/2013
It's been a busy 2013 here at CloudFlare. By all external measures it was a terrific year. We grew page views, revenue and traffic across our network – all by more than 400%. We added terrific partners and high profile customers. ...
Using CloudFlare to mix domain sharding and SPDY
12/26/2013
It’s common knowledge that domain sharding, where the resources in a web page are shared across different domains (or subdomains), is a good thing. ...
Keeping our open source promise
12/22/2013
Back in October I wrote a blog post about CloudFlare and open source software titled CloudFlare And Open Source Software: A Two-Way Street which detailed the many ways in which we use and support open source software....
Introducing USV: CloudFlare's newest investor
12/17/2013
It's been an exciting day here at CloudFlare. We are happy to finally introduce our newest investors, Union Square Ventures. This blog post was written by Brad Burnham, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, and previously appeared on the USV blog....
Ask CloudFlare: How do I make my website faster?
12/10/2013
We get asked this question all the time: How do I make my website faster? So, on Thursday, we're holding a webcast to go through our recommendations and also answer your questions live....
Red October: CloudFlare’s Open Source Implementation of the Two-Man Rule
11/21/2013
At CloudFlare, we are always looking for better ways to secure the data we’re entrusted with. This means hardening our system against outside threats such as hackers, but it also means protecting against insider threats. ...
The two reasons to be an engineer at CloudFlare
11/12/2013
If you're thinking about joining a startup as an engineer we'd like you to think of CloudFlare. The two most important reasons to think of CloudFlare are... because of who your colleagues would be and who our customers are (and who their customers are)....
What we've been doing with Go
11/11/2013
Almost two years ago CloudFlare started working with Go. What started as an experiment on one network and concurrency heavy project has turned into full, production use of Go for multiple services....
Cloud-o-ween
10/31/2013
Over the weekend, I happened by a pumpkin carving contest in Monterey. One of the winning pumpkins was a low-relief scene of a pirate ship. The hull was created by carving the pumpkin in the traditional way....
A (Relatively Easy To Understand) Primer on Elliptic Curve Cryptography
10/24/2013
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is one of the most powerful but least understood types of cryptography in wide use today. At CloudFlare, we make extensive use of ECC to secure everything from our customers' HTTPS connections to how we pass data between our data centers....