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How are so many sites OK with using cloudflare when they are basically a MITM? (alien.top)
submitted 2 years ago by [B] to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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Regardless of whether or not you provide your own SSL certificates, cloudflare still uses their own between their servers and client browsers. So any SSL encrypted traffic is unencrypted at their end before being re-encrypted with your certificate. How can such an entity be trusted?

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[–] [B] 1 point 2 years ago (10 children)

Because it's "everyone's MITM" it would make it a perfect spot for state actors to tap into in order to surveil pretty much everything without anyone being able to notice.

Hell, just the server logs (timestamps, IP addresses and exact URLs) would be unbelievably valuable.

I'd be really surprised if someone wasn't taking advantage of that.

Which is to say if you selfhost because you want more control and privacy, you probably want to avoid services like that.

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  • [–] [B] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    ThePirateBay, the most notorious site in the world, uses Cloudflare. This isn't China. Wiretapping is illegal in most circumstances, and that's essentially what it would be doing.

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  • [–] [B] 1 point 2 years ago

    Wiretapping is only illegal if it isn't sanctioned in some way.

    They can spy on anyone who isn't an American citizen legally, so they could probably tap into any server that's outside the US.

    They can also spy on people if a secret court allows them to do so, and (by design) you would never even know about it.

    Lastly they can simply have deals with agencies from other countries that have similar "restrictions" where they tap into the US data and then they just exchange the collected data, because then it's technically not them who is doing it so it's perfectly legal.

    They certainly have no obligation (or desire) to keep anyone's data private - especially from themselves.

    ThePirateBay, the most notorious site in the world, uses Cloudflare.

    It wouldn't be far fetched to think that now that the battle against it was lost on all fronts it would work as a good honeypot. You never know what or who is behind it.

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  • [–] [B] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    Hell, just the server logs (timestamps, IP addresses and exact URLs) would be unbelievably valuable.

    People say that, but the actual data would be so vast and with so little actual usability, that the dilution of it still results in largely garbage data. Its only when you have a particular focus and have the ability to filter to that focus that the data becomes very valuable.

    Even banks and card processors, who have direct, legal, and completely open access to data as critical as where every one of their customers spends money struggle to do more than harvest aggregated usage patterns. The idea that data volumes, at a couple more orders of magnitude and notably more generalized will be easily processed and harvested ends up being pretty silly.

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  • [–] [B] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Well yeah, it's not easy. Which is why they limit what they do to the aggregated data or to targeted discovery.

    But that's only a small technical hurdle and the speed with which you can analyze the data grows much faster than the volume (especially if you are smart about what data you analyze and how you do it) so it won't last forever.

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  • [–] [B] 1 point 2 years ago

    But that's only a small technical hurdle and the speed with which you can analyze the data grows much faster than the volume (especially if you are smart about what data you analyze and how you do it) so it won't last forever.

    In 10 years, we've made such slow progress on conquering that "small technical hurdle" that it's hard to take the argument seriously.

    Generative AI data ingestion techniques are the first round of technology that come close to being able to target the data volume/complexity we'd see in it, and those ingestion techniques are still:

    • Very expensive
    • Time consuming
    • Produce datastores with largely unusable data for the general purpose

    And the techniques that pull data from them don't end up saying more than what you could have gotten from a directed observation. You need to know what you're looking for to get it, or you'd need to code particular ingestion techniques to be able to extract the patterns you wanted to scan for.

    So, the end result is still the same: Your concern is over a directed attempt to wiretap you, and if that is your concern, then there are a bunch of other places you need to be concerned with.

    Also, if your primary concern is the number of people/agencies that might be trying to wiretap you, then I'd probably agree that Cloudflare is not for you. Maybe some sort of Tor connection via an array of cellular antennae?

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  • [–] [S, B] 1 point 2 years ago

    Because it's "everyone's MITM" it would make it a perfect spot for state actors to tap into in order to surveil pretty much everything without anyone being able to notice.

    Yep, that's my main point

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  • [–] [B] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Depends what you’re putting on there. If it’s some blog that’s out there for the world to see, and if you’d like to have more traffic checking it out, then privacy isn’t your goal. Now your personal data, yeah that’s different. I have that stuff segregated.

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  • [–] [B] 1 point 2 years ago

    As I said in another comment, it's more about your visitors than you.

    Sure maybe if you have a completely generic blog about cooking or something it doesn't matter much. But still as long as you can use that information (along with information from every other site that user visits through Cloudflare) to infer stuff about that person it becomes kinda scary.

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  • [–] [B] 0 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    If your threat model includes the U.S. government you are in the very, very, very, very, very minority of the population of selfhosters.

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  • [–] [B] 1 point 2 years ago

    Right, but it's not necessary only about that; if you care about other people and/or you don't want to give the US and their spy agencies more power - perhaps if they are opposed to what they do and the idea of mass surveillance in general (and that's even if it doesn't affect you directly, which is most likely the case) this is a pretty simple way to make sure that you aren't contributing to it.

    It's like with, I dunno, consumerism. If you don't like it, just don't do it since it opposes your views anyway. And sure your impact will be pretty small but it's still easy to do and it's kind of a win-win situation?

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