Why some cryptographic keys are much smaller than others
2013-09-20
If you connect to CloudFlare's web site using HTTPS the connection will be secured using one of the many encryption schemes supported by SSL/TLS. ...
Why secure systems require random numbers
2013-09-13
If you've been following recent news about technical spying by the US National Security Agency and the UK's Government Communications Headquarters you may have come across a claim that the NSA was involved in weakening a random number generator. ...
SXSW 2014: Get your PanelPicker votes in today!
2013-09-05
CloudFlare is headed to the Interactive portion of SXSW in Austin from March 7-11, 2014. We are very excited to share some of the knowledge and experiences we’ve gained since our CloudFlare journey began. ...
Details Behind Today's Internet Hacks
2013-08-27
At 1:19pm (PDT) today, a researcher noticed that the New York Times' website wasn't loading. We know the New York Times tech team, so we sent an email to check in. A few minutes later, the CTO of the NYT called us back. ...
The story of a little DNS easter egg
2013-08-27
About a year ago, we realized that CloudFlare's current DNS infrastructure had some challenges. We were using PowerDNS, an open source DNS server that is popular with hosting providers. ...
Recycling memory buffers in Go
2013-08-24
This blog post is very old now. You probably don't want to use the techniques described here. GO'S sync.Pool is a better way to go....
CloudFlare's new WAF: compiling to Lua
2013-08-23
We use nginx throughout our network for front-line web serving, proxying and traffic filtering. In some cases, we've augmented the core C code of nginx with our own modules, but recently we've made a major move to using Lua in conjunction with nginx. One project that's now almost entirely written in Lua is the new CloudFlare WAF that we blogged about the other day. The Lua WAF uses the nginx Lua module to embed Lua code and execute that code as part of the normal nginx handling of phases....
Updating Our Privacy Policy
2013-08-20
Hi I’m Ken Carter, CloudFlare’s newly minted in-house counsel. Now that I have introduced myself, feel free to introduce yourself. Or, don’t. You may want to remain anonymous because you value your privacy. We do, too. ...
Heuristics and Rules: Why We Built a New Old WAF
2013-08-19
We just rolled out an update to CloudFlare's Web Application Firewall (WAF). Previously, CloudFlare's WAF has received criticism from people who have tested it and found that it didn't behave as traditional WAFs are expected to. ...
Cloudflare and Free Speech
2013-08-09
This question assumes the answer. A website is speech. It is not a bomb. There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain....
What's the story behind the names of CloudFlare's name servers?
2013-08-06
We're going to do a series of blog posts about some of the inner workings of CloudFlare. One of the questions we get often is what the names of our name servers mean. Here's the story....
DDoS Prevention: Protecting The Origin
2013-07-30
One of the many great features that CloudFlare provides is protection from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. A malicious party who wants to make your website or web service unavailable could try to overwhelm it with requests from compromised machines (or bots) all around the world. ...
A Tour Inside CloudFlare's Latest Generation Servers
2013-07-22
CloudFlare operates at a significant scale, handling more than a trillion requests through our network every month. ...
Government Surveillance: Why Transparency Matters
2013-07-18
The web is one of the greatest inventions of human history because it has made the world more transparent. Fundamentally, that's what the web does: it takes information that was inaccessible and opaque and makes it available and lucid....
Railgun Gives our Ecommerce Sites the Edge
2013-07-15
In March 2013, we started testing Railgun, and slowly rolled it out across our three web properties. We saw immediate results. First, we saw instant reductions in time to retrieve uncached HTML documents, and as an ecommerce web property every millisecond counts....
Staying on top of TLS attacks
2013-07-11
CloudFlare makes extensive use of TLS connections throughout our service which makes staying on top of the latest news about security problems with TLS a priority. We use TLS both externally and internally and different uses of TLS have different constraints....
Integrating Kyoto Tycoon With PostgreSQL
2013-07-08
CloudFlare has Points of Presence (PoPs) in 23 datacenters around the world and plans to expand to many more soon. It also has a single portal, CloudFlare.com, where website owners interact with the system. ...
Mirage 2.0: Solving the Mobile Browsing Speed Challenge
2013-06-13
Almost exactly a year ago, CloudFlare announced a feature called Mirage. Mirage was designed to make the loading of images faster in two primary ways....
CloudFlare will be at HostingCon 2013 in Full Force
2013-06-12
The CloudFlare team will be at HostingCon 2013 in Austin next week. This is our third year at the show and we have a lot of things in store for partners. ...
CloudFlare, PRISM, and Securing SSL Ciphers
2013-06-12
Over the last week we've closely watched the disclosures about the alleged NSA PRISM program. At CloudFlare, we have never been approached to participate in PRISM or any other similar program. ...