The Curious Case of Cloudflare
A Visionary Cloud Leader
Cloud Security Tools : Cloudflare Turnstile For Bot Prevention
Instead of Google Captcha, where to prove you are not a bot, a user would need to select all the buses or cars, Cloudflare has made waves with its free alternative to bot prevention: Cloudflare Turnstile. Released in 2022, but already seeing major adoption, you probably have seen it before. One of the great things about this product is that it does not cause as many users to get frustrated and leave.
R2: A Cloud Storage Alternative to S3
AWS, GCP and Azure all charge egress fees per gigabyte - usually in the range of .05$ to .09 $ per gb. This has led to a lot of caching of the objects, and generally has slowed innovation surrounding video and vpn products on these clouds. When coupled with Cloudflare CDN, this product can be very powerful. It is ideal for web content delivery, video streaming, static site hosting, and applications that benefit from low egress costs and edge delivery.
Cloud Security Solutions: Adaptive DDoS protection
One of Cloudflare’s earliest successful products was its DDOS protection. One can imagine that a company that routes 20% of all internet traffic, can have very advanced security tools. The CEO tells a story of how they protected Eurovision from DDOS attacks, and
Cloudflare's DDoS protection is often considered superior to other solutions for several reasons. Here are the key factors that contribute to its effectiveness and popularity:
Cloudflare’s WAF
Web Application Firewalls that cloudflare provides has proved to be highly useful for securing public APIs. They can set IP based throttle limits, and protect against malicious payloads. One of the great things about this cloud security tool is that it is easy to setup and has so much power. From my experience, the first time I noticed it was when I was using a public API for stock history. I was being throttled after 25 calls on my IP address.
Cloudflare managed rules
Core OWASP rules (Top 10 exploit patterns)
Advanced rate limiting
In the modern world, data is key. There are so many companies (ChatGPT) that scrape the web consistently by using bots. While in the competitive cyber space, bots will often adapt and find a way, for the majority of naive scraping tools, Cloudflare is able to block them.
Some other advantages that Cloudflare has
Global Network and Scale
Extensive Network: Cloudflare operates one of the largest and most interconnected networks globally, with data centers in over 200 cities. This extensive network allows for rapid mitigation of DDoS attacks close to their source.
Massive Capacity: With over 100 Tbps of network capacity, Cloudflare can absorb and mitigate even the largest DDoS attacks.
Advanced Mitigation Techniques
Machine Learning and AI: Cloudflare employs machine learning algorithms to identify and mitigate threats in real-time. This allows for dynamic and adaptive protection against evolving attack patterns.
Layered Defense: Cloudflare provides protection across multiple layers of the OSI model, including Layer 3/4 (network/transport) and Layer 7 (application). This comprehensive approach ensures protection against various types of DDoS attacks, from volumetric to application layer attacks.
Real-Time Threat Intelligence
Global Threat Data: Cloudflare’s vast network continuously collects data on threats, which is shared across all its customers. This real-time threat intelligence helps in identifying and mitigating new threats quickly.
Automated Mitigation: Cloudflare’s systems can automatically detect and respond to attacks without human intervention, ensuring swift and efficient mitigation.