It looks like a volumetric attack from this tweet. Wikipedia needs to use Verisign BGP mitigation. They create GRE tunnels to your routers and are capable of handling 2Tbps. During an attack, you make a BGP announcement and the traffic goes via Verisign scrubbing/tunnels. No application changes are required, no Matthew Prince selectively and benevolently enforcing CF neutrality. It's used by large banks.
After working with a few large corporations and their DDoS protection solutions, I did not have a good experience with Verisign, and they were not able to handle attacks or get things working.
However, I have great experiences with Akamai and Cloudflare. I trust the people at Wikimedia will choose wisely.
I would I have learned that Verisign has one of the worst BGP mitigation/scraping solutions out there.
There are a few alternatives that have more experience and provide much better uptime, include solutions from Cloudflare and Akamai.
Any serious mitigation solution must be BGP based, not proxy. Besides its technical merits and convenience, it also minimizes the risk of a benevolent controller (e.g. Matthew Prince of Cloudflare) ruining your company, because it becomes your upstream provider only during the attacks. Otherwise the GRE tunnels are not in use. The IP addresses are still yours always.
We used Verisign for mitigation of a 44Gbps volumetric attack and it worked very well. We also evaluated Neustar, but Verisign's infrastructure seemed to be more robust.
That's your requirement, but it might not be Wikipedia's requirement. Ownership of IPs is really a technical detail invisible to most people; ownership of eyeballs by way of the domain name and top Google result is probably more important. Cloudflare doesn't impact that ownership other than being able to temporarily take you offline if they choose to terminate your site.
Still, large proxy-based CDNs do have the ability to completely bypass all the same-origin protections in the browser. Even if they are angels and don't abuse this trust for identity theft and surveillance, it makes them a juicy target for bad actors, state sponsored and otherwise.
A proxy is a perfectly acceptable “serious” solution for this type of problem, as well as nearly all of the rest. Wikipedia is not the kind of website that would warrant being removed from Cloudflare. What’s wrong with having an upstream provider for caching close to the user and other features when you’re not under attack?
That’s not what MITM means. I get that you don’t like Cloudflare but voluntary use of a CDN isn’t a MITM any more than, say, Amazon is a MITM because you host on EC2.
Cloudflare is in between the client and the server, decrypting, rewriting and (if set up right) re-encrypting the request/response. It masquerades as the server by presenting a proper certificate for the domain even though it is not the entity that is actually controlling the domain.
That to me sounds very much like MITM, although it is not a MITM attack since the entity controlling the domain opted into it, so basically it is voluntary MITM.
Using a VPS like EC2 is a different story since the decryption happens within the layer that you control. Of course you need to make sure that you choose a vendor for that layer that you trust, but on EC2 the traffic that amazon sees is encrypted with keys they don't have and decrypted with keys stored on a layer that I control. Amazon could read out the memory of my EC2 to get the keys but their business depends on not doing so, so in this case either I have a vendor that always will decrypt and read traffic (Cloudflare), or a vendor whose business depends on hypothetically being able to but not doing it. There is a clear difference to me.
That is the same for most CDN's (including CloudFront and all the other major offerings), so I'm not trying to single out Cloudflare.
If you don’t trust Cloudflare, don’t use them but there’s no meaningful security distinction between what they do and what AWS does: in both cases you have a vendor with the capability of violating your security and a promise that they won’t abuse that access.
This is why having a threat model is so important: it keeps you from wasting effort on things which sound like security but aren’t actually changing anything meaningful.
There is a security distinction, and this has been shown by for example cloudbleed. Every step that has access to plaintext data is a potential attack vector and might be logging/leaking information.
Cloudflare’s business also depends on not messing with your traffic, right? It would certainly be easier for them to get your users’ content than for Amazon to do the same, but I think you still have to accept that risk with either. “Hypothetically being able to but not doing it” isn’t a whole lot of confidence if I were hosting some kind of shady website.
Sure, but since Cloudflare’s business is actively "messing" with all your traffic, all the time it's a smaller technical step to do it some more, and can also lead to accidents like cloudbleed. Every step that has access to unencrypted data is a potential attack vector or might be logging/leaking data.
You upload your private SSL key to Cloudflare for example. And I was talking about hosting on your own hardware/colos like most large sites do (7x cheaper than AWS list prices on avg)
Please specify in detail how you believe that’s an MITM using the standard industry definition. In particular, consider whether “attack” and “voluntary business agreement” are synonyms.
Breaking open encryption to monitor activity between users and other sites is a completely different thing than having a provider handle hosting for your site.
A better comparison would be Cloudfront and Application Load Balancers since you can expose your own ec2 server or load balancer and be e2e encrypted (unless AWS wanted to run commands on your instance, which they could do, but that's a different threat vector entirely).
That was the model I had in mind but it’s not really a meaningful distinction since the host could almost certainly compromise those servers as well. In any case, you’re trusting a third party rather than having their involvement maliciously imposed.
The originalcontent was posted on IG. 8ch took the reposts down when it became known that it was connected to the real shooting. Watch the video with the 8ch founder explaining (unless YouTube took it down too). Matt was preparing for the IPO.
You appear to be extremely mad that anyone questions the power of political pressure and an angry mob.
Look, you can feel however you like about whether the high-profile takedowns are right or wrong, whether the CEO's promises after the Daily Stormer are hypocritical — but let's be clear-eyed about placing a site in a position where one outside person can do it real harm. The question you should look at is whether the risk is actually acceptable for your organization.
By your statement then reddit was complicit with the Russian trolls during election season because the bitcoin trolls who evolved into trump trolls were not punished in the slightest (I have a list of 300+ usernames that are still active today)
The point is that Reddit tries to moderate, which is good enough for their providers (AWS/Fastly).
The 8ch takedown wasn't actually due to issues with moderation, since (at least based on the owner's video) 8ch removed the post, actively responds to real law enforcement requests, and the original post was actually posted to IG. The issue was that CF was getting enough bad press, and more importantly enough calls/concerns from real Enterprise clients (this is speculation on my part), to take down the website.
That's a valid stance but they didn't host the website; they only provided DDOS protection for the actual host (which proceeded to drop 8ch once CF stopped providing the protection).
> It looks like a volumetric attack from this tweet. Wikipedia needs to use Verisign BGP mitigation. They create GRE tunnels to your routers and are capable of handling 2Tbps.
Great way for a state actor to intercept your traffic. little bit of volumetric dos and the target themselves responds by tunning through your partner(s).
>no Matthew Prince selectively and benevolently enforcing CF neutrality.
What's the logic behind this? It's still a single point of failure and relying on a corporation. If the daily stormer or 8chan tried to use them, they would probably kicked off as well.
CloudFlare has strategic business partnership with Baidu [1]. They are very likely to cooperate with the chinese government to implement the great chinese firewall.
Additionally, helping to block Wikipedia because China says so is much easier to excuse than blocking 4chan - they would just be complying with local regulations after all.
The cloudfare 8chan action was based on a direct link with multiple actual mass-shootings. Moreover, as they took the decision they went to great pains to explain this was an exceptional case.
Going from that to 'undesired political speech will be censored' requires more of a slippery cliff than a slippery slope.
> What is this "direct link" you speak of? Did the shooters plan/recruit/organize their attacks on 8chan?
Legally, a "direct link" is irrelevant, you can rarely find a "direct link" between two of anything. What matters legally is whether 8chan was a "proximate cause" in creating the mass shootings. Whether one thing is the "proximate cause" of another is often pretty difficult to discern.
However, as a helpful guide towards determining proximate cause, lawyers ask whether one thing was the "but for" cause of another, i.e., would the mass shootings occur "but for" 8Chan? Put another way, if 8Chan did not exist, would these shootings occur?
Unfortunately, we do not have an alternative reality to play out events without 8Chan, so we cannot know for certain, but we can use evidence (e.g., 8Chan chats, how the shooter interacted with 8Chan and others on the service, etc) to try to simulate that alternative reality. All of this analysis also needs to consider related issues like freedom of speech on public forums and any commercial interests.
I'm not saying 8Chan is guilty or innocent, just that the existence (or lack thereof) of a "direct link" is pretty meaningless.
So FB's internet peers should depeer Facebook then in their routers, since the original material (the stream) was on FB? Or you prefer your justice selective?
you're not really engaging with his point. Effectively banning 8chan by removing network protection does not just restrict extremists; it restricts anyone who used that forum.
Ultimately, such matters should be prosecuted by courts. It is inappropriate for organisations like cloudflare to leverage their position within essential network infrastructure to start editorialising what passes through their network.
It is inappropriate for organisations like cloudflare to leverage their position within essential network infrastructure to start editorialising what passes through their network.
No, I think it's entirely appropriate.
"Don't troll" and methods for dealing with trolls has been a thing all sites have done since the internet was invented. I don't see any difference here at all.
Cloudflare blocking people that abuse the network is legitimate (e.g. spam, denial-of-service), just like it is legitimate for forum admins to block people that abuse the forum (trolling, explicit posts).
But cloudflare, or any other network infrastructure provider, shouldn't be determining permissible content for websites because they are not hosts/administrators for that content.
It is like a postal service reading your letters and then saying "we don't like what is being said, so you can't send letters anymore." They can and should stop people sending dangerous materials by post, but they should not be determining permissible content of letters.
See, I think 8-chan itself is a troll, and it is entirely reasonable to deal with it by refusing to provide service.
It is like a postal service reading your letters and then saying "we don't like what is being said, so you can't send letters anymore." They can and should stop people sending dangerous materials by post, but they should not be determining permissible content of letters.
No it's not. It's like FedEx declining to deliver for a company which continues to cause it problems, or refusing to service Amazon[1]. Or like Visa refusing to service businesses which have lots of charge-backs.
if 8chan was cut off because they were subject to extensive network attacks and cloudflare did not see any profit or value in serving them then I am ok with that. I just don't think that's the reason.
I expect that a different site with the same contract and payment terms, subject to the same attacks would have continued to be protected. maybe I'm wrong but it looked like a political decision, not a business decision.
It's not just supporting. Taking a neutral stance on censoring these things, or not being adequately proactive on hate speech, is now seen as condoning. You either censor your user base, or upstream will censor you. Gone are the days of "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." The new policy is "The net interprets wrongthink as noise and filters it out."
It’s not censorship: they are not suppressing information, they just aren’t allowing their resources to be used to spread it.
It would be “censorship” if they actively antagonized any attempt to spread the information, such as by lawsuit or DMCA notice. They are just refusing to participate.
And given that the “information” is definitively known to be child pornography and violent white supremacy propaganda presented as news, I would personally say refusing to participate is the only responsible action.
> Gone are the days of "The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
But it's clear that it matters just what's being censored. Surely you wouldn't say the same trite clever-sounding hackerspeak if we're talking about censorship of threats, assault and child pornography, would you?
They are beyond a certain line; some very-very far past it, some just crossed it. It makes them unsupportable by any corporation that aims to look decent.
Genocide has been and still is a political tool. It is extreme, but ultimately something that people consider and carry out as part of political processes, not a special category of its own. And realpolitik is to continue dealing with countries that practice genocide. Consider Burma or China.
Cloudflare simply has the luxury of choosing which politically disagreeable parties they do not want to associate with because they are insignificant customers.
Pretending that this is not due to differences in politics and moral judgment is semantic smoke and mirrors.
Anyway, the point is that they are not a neutral carrier/providers. Unlike banks or telecoms which are required by regulation to accept any legal business. CF styles itself as neutral infrastructure, until they decide they are not.
The risk of getting deplatformed due to someone's moral judgment is quite real, even for an entity such as Wikipedia. For example they were blocked in the UK because the Virgin Killer album cover landed it on a block list used by major ISP.
I didn’t say it wasn’t political, but it’s not just undesirable for immediate political reasons — it’s undesirable for nearly universally-agreed moral and ethical reasons. So implying it’s only inconvenient for politics is, in my opinion, misleading.
The political tends to encompass or at least subsume the moral and ethical aspects, as I tried to allude to with the realpolitik aspect.
But again, this is just a tangent. The core argument is that it is best not to rely on providers that have the freedom to make political/moral decisions who they deal with because that freedom makes them susceptible to moral denial of service attacks. You are one moral outrage away from being deplatformed.
The argument made here is there is a chance (however minute) that the same can happen to something like Wikipedia because of some misplaced sense of morality, like say - we don't agree with wikipedia edits and editing process which we see if offending certain sections of X population. It does not matter how right their reason is. The fact that providers like cloud flare are in such position to take a moral high stance is not right ...
There's plenty of specialized providers which provide this service, Verisign is one of many.
The issue with on-demand BGP mitigation is that an attacker can do short attacks on and off over a long period of time. Each time the mitigation kicks in, BGP propagation takes at least ~1 minute and will cause some downtime. Proper protection is always-on without requiring redirection.
