Comment by sophacles
1 year ago
Honestly, I was confused because both pages you link are full of the word proxy, have links to deeper discussions of what a proxy does (including explicit mentions of decryption/re-encryption), and are literally developer docs. Additionally Cloudflare's blog explaining these things in depth are high in search results, and also make the front page here on the regular.
I incorrectly interpreted your comment as one of the multitude of comments claiming nefarious reasons for proxying without any thought for how an alternative would work.
Magic Transit is interesting - hard to imagine how it would scale down to a small site though, they apparently advertise whole prefixes over BGP, and most sites don't even have a dedicated IP, let alone a whole /24 to throw around.
I understand your sentiment, as I reacted similarly the first time someone brought this to my attention. However, after logging into my Cloudflare account, viewing the DNS record page, and attempting to find any mention of SSL decryption, and then clicking on related docs pages (and links from them!) I was still unable to find this information.
You're right that Cloudflare has written many high-quality blog posts on the workings of the Internet, and the inner workings at Cloudflare. Amusingly, they even at times criticize HTTPS interception (not their use of it) and offer a tool to detect: https://blog.cloudflare.com/monsters-in-the-middleboxes/
I still believe that this information should be displayed to the relevant user configuring the service.
There are many types of proxies, and MITM decryption is not an inherent part of a proxy. The linked page from the Admin Panel is https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/manage-dns-records/ref... and links to pages like "How Cloudflare works" (https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/concepts/how-...) which still do not mention HTTPS interception. It sounds like you found a link I didn't. In the past someone argued that I should've looked here: https://developers.cloudflare.com/data-localization/faq/#are...
But if you look closer, those are docs for the Data Localization Suite, an Enterprise-only paid addon.
cloudflare is primarily a caching proxy. in order to perform any caching, they would have to have the unencrypted objects. check, mate.
It is sad that in this day and age, when you buy a car you need to sign a legal exclaimer that you understand it requires gasoline to run.
Cloudflare's CDN capabilities are separate from DDOS protection and indeed many requests cannot be cached due to the resources being sensitive (i.e. authenticated requests.)
Again, there are many forms of proxies and DDOS protection that do not rely on TLS interception, just as there are cars that do not rely on gasoline. Cloudflare has many less technical home users who use their service to avoid sharing their IP online, avoid DDOS, or access home resources. I do not think the average Internet user is familiar with these concepts. There are many examples of surprised users on subreddits like /r/homelab.
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