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?
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.
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.
From a host side:
AWS/GCP/Azure, scaling is built in; maybe isn’t cheaper than self hosting, but it eliminates maintenance worries, uptime is their responsibility.
Cloud front, F5, imperva: protection from: sql injection, basic script attacks, ddos, and man in the middle.
To avoid them you’d have to stick to small time web sites that self host and handle attacks on their own. Funny enough when I ran small-time sites we never had a successful injection attack, and I handled a ddos attack by just blocking IPs one at a time till they gave up. It’s not hard, but when the company hits a certain size where they hire a cyber security specialist, all the sudden we need these additional protection tools.
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.
Forget about threat model. It's becoming increasingly an irrelevant concept, as we reach total globalization and centralisation of all of these global companies.
It's frustrating, but it could be addressed by the EU members just like how they always have blew up Google so many times on so many occasions by suing them millions of dollars.
It isn't feasible to avoid using the top few CDNs in the world, of which cloudflare is one. Using a traffic anonymizing service simply kicks the can down the road, and now you need to trust the service you use to obfuscate your identity.
If you use Apple devices, which I'm guessing you don't, then be aware that cloudflare operates some of Apple's anonymization nodes. If you rely on TOR to obfuscate who you are, beware that several nations run a LOT of that infrastructure so they can correlate entry and exit information. If you use a paid VPN service, your payment details and account link you directly to the traffic you generate. Do you really trust those services to face government prosecution to protect you?
It's a hard spot to be in, especially with fewer and fewer companies controlling larger portions of the internet.
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.
That’s really misleading. Most admins use Cloudflare’s gratis service and they use CF to handle the traffic load. This is only possible if CF has the private key and sees the traffic. If CF cannot see the traffic, it must pass it all through to the source webserver which defeats the purpose of using CF.
Most importantly, users have no way of knowing whether a web service opts to use their own key or CFs key. It’s impossible. So wise users have no choice but to assume the worst case (which is also the strong majority of cases): that CF sees the traffic.
If you're so concerned about being tracked at those levels you might need to get off for your own mental well being anyways. If you don't want the benefits of the service (ddos attack protections for major sites, consistent website up time) leave it behind.
If you’re so concerned about being tracked at those levels
What do you mean by “at those levels”? You seem to imply Cloudflare’s abuse is not vastly harmful.
CF ruins Tor, VPNs, discriminates against poor people behind CGNAT, and people who look like bots because they don’t load images. You don’t even get basic protection from IP disclosure. CF sees all traffic on most of their sites, including usernames and unhashed passwords. The OP’s demand is reasonable. The demand that everyone partake in such reckless disclosure to a single gatekeeper running a private walled-garden is not reasonable. Cloudflare has removed the minimum baseline of security that everyone used to have and failed to achieve even a low level of privacy.
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.
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 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 nslookup and whois... Any other hints on this?
nslookup www.monero.townwhois -h whois.arin.net n <IP-Adress from prev command> | egrep 'Organization'