The US IP address is for Cloudflare, who are acting as a front end for things like DDoS protection. A lot of lemmy servers use them, which is unfortunate, but there don’t seem to be any viable European alternatives.
You can check the details with the whois command. The relevant bit when querying for one of their addresses is:
Cloudflare don’t hoat sites, but they do end up being a ‘man in the middle’ attack on any site they proxy for, regardless of where that site is nominally hosted. That ends up exposing all traffic on those sites to a US corporation, and ultimately the US government. Considering that Cloudflare proxy somewhere between 19% and 40% of all websites, I think that’s pretty alarming.
You’ll be attacked and pay for the priviledge! I suppose what you’re really paying for is knowing who’s attacking you. Mind you, I think it’s free for small sites, which is probably quite an attractive trade-off for many.
I don’t get the ‘man in the middle’ part. Is the ssl key for the encrypted https connection not from LW, but from cloudflare?
It’s still problematic that they have metadata of the connections.
But isn’t for https the traffic supposed to be e2e encrypted between the client web browser and the server hosting the web page with the same cert? Does cloudflare decrypt and then re-encrypt the traffic data?
You see the problem. Yes, cloudflare decrypt the request from the browser, inspect it, then reencrypt it and send it to the host server. Then they take the response, decrypt that, inspect it, reencrypt it and send it to the browser.
Basically there are two TLS flows, one from the browser to cloudflare, and one from clourflare to the host server. Between those, on the cloudflare system, both the traffic and response are in plain text. That includes usernames, passwords (for HTTP basic auth anyway) and any sensitive data you send or receive.
Given that they front sonewhere between 19 and 40% of all websites, d£pending on whose stats you trust, that should be pretty alarming.
The US IP address is for Cloudflare, who are acting as a front end for things like DDoS protection. A lot of lemmy servers use them, which is unfortunate, but there don’t seem to be any viable European alternatives.
You can check the details with the
whoiscommand. The relevant bit when querying for one of their addresses is:NetRange: 104.16.0.0 - 104.31.255.255 CIDR: 104.16.0.0/12 NetName: CLOUDFLARENET NetHandle: NET-104-16-0-0-1 Parent: NET104 (NET-104-0-0-0-0) NetType: Direct Allocation OriginAS: AS13335 Organization: Cloudflare, Inc. (CLOUD14) RegDate: 2014-03-28 Updated: 2024-09-04 Comment: All Cloudflare abuse reporting can be done via https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse Comment: Geofeed: https://api.cloudflare.com/local-ip-ranges.csv Ref: https://rdap.arin.net/registry/ip/104.16.0.0Thank you. So that’s why you ‘see’ an US IP address while the physical server may be located anywhere, e.g. in Germany.
By looking at their Wikipedia, I’ve already found out that Cloudflare doesn’t do hosting.
Cloudflare don’t hoat sites, but they do end up being a ‘man in the middle’ attack on any site they proxy for, regardless of where that site is nominally hosted. That ends up exposing all traffic on those sites to a US corporation, and ultimately the US government. Considering that Cloudflare proxy somewhere between 19% and 40% of all websites, I think that’s pretty alarming.
It’s not an attack of you pay for it
You’ll be attacked and pay for the priviledge! I suppose what you’re really paying for is knowing who’s attacking you. Mind you, I think it’s free for small sites, which is probably quite an attractive trade-off for many.
I don’t get the ‘man in the middle’ part. Is the ssl key for the encrypted https connection not from LW, but from cloudflare?
It’s still problematic that they have metadata of the connections.
For cloudflare to encrypt the traffic they need the key.
But isn’t for https the traffic supposed to be e2e encrypted between the client web browser and the server hosting the web page with the same cert? Does cloudflare decrypt and then re-encrypt the traffic data?
Supposed and supposed… It’s easier to manage encryption and certificates on a layer above, you can reencrypt backwards with some whatever cert
You can of course not use cloudflares infra for this but then you lost a lot of insight and features
You see the problem. Yes, cloudflare decrypt the request from the browser, inspect it, then reencrypt it and send it to the host server. Then they take the response, decrypt that, inspect it, reencrypt it and send it to the browser.
Basically there are two TLS flows, one from the browser to cloudflare, and one from clourflare to the host server. Between those, on the cloudflare system, both the traffic and response are in plain text. That includes usernames, passwords (for HTTP basic auth anyway) and any sensitive data you send or receive.
Given that they front sonewhere between 19 and 40% of all websites, d£pending on whose stats you trust, that should be pretty alarming.
Thank you. I didn’t know that.