Self-Hosted Main

A lot of people in this thread have never been ddosed and it shows. You don't need to host a super popular thing to get ddosed.

When you host game servers there are gonna be salty 16 years old that go to a free stresser and hit you with 1gbps.

And you might think "well yeah but it's not like cloudflare's free plan protects that much".

It does, believe me. I've done tests with people who have access to botnets and without cloudflare with 1gbps our connection was dead. With cloudflare it didn't go down and reported more than 50gbps on the cloudflare dashboard.

Also another thing is that a lot of these people are 16 year old script kiddies, and not seeing your IP directly discourages them.

Yes, you’re right that there’s a certain amount of trust you need to have in CF… but what are you trusting it to do? And if they fail, what are the consequences?

Honest question - even if you are sending your Vaultwarden traffic over CF, and they are watching or attacking, you have to trust that the e2e encryption of Vaultwarden is what’s keeping you safe, right? Not the SSL certs. Does the auth mechanism rely on the SSL certs not to be compromised? I would hope not.

For me, it’s about trade offs.

https://www.troyhunt.com/cloudflare-ssl-and-unhealthy-security-absolutism/

https://serverfault.com/questions/662946/does-cloudflare-know-the-decrypted-content-when-using-a-https-connection

These two data sources kinda sum it up for me - “If you are concerned that cloudflare can read your data - don't use cloudflare.”

But I do want to be sure that any e2e encrypted app doesn’t rely on SSL for its “end-to-end”.

If you want then to cache your content to reduce the load of your servers, they have to decrypt the traffic. This is how a reverse proxy works.

And, well, you have to trust them before contract their services. The same way people trust vpns to route their traffic. If I was from some 3 letter agency and want to spy on potential illegal content, I would tap into a vpn server.

What is it you're afraid cloudflare is doing? This is a company trusted by tons of corporations who have legit secrets to protect. Why would they care about intercepting your traffic? To what end?

Cyber attacks are goal-oriented and based on attack cost, basically how much effort for how much reward. Is your selfhost traffic super valuable? So valuable that someone would hack cloudflare to get it?

In reality, other than commodity malware that your security suite should easily pick up, there isn't much threat in my opinion.

Thats not what a MITM is

A MITM is a Man-in-the-Middle Attack, someone whom you dont trust or dont know has hijacked your network connection to either read, remove or modify data from your network packets and then proxy-send it to your initial intended target

Cloudflare is a proxy server, a person you TRUST and designated to passthrough first to scan and check for network security before it redirects and pass your packets through to your intended target, like a gatekeeper

What, you gonna call all your gatekeepers, your bouncers, your proxy servers a MITM?

CF is not using „their own“! The certificates the client see must be provided and authorized by the provider of the service. Or put in other words: CF is acting as the hosting provider to the outside, to the clients.

The rest of journey is „inside“ the domain of the provider of the service. It is totally normal that traffic has some journey to go and often it never touches the premises of the provider or even a server owned by the provider.

The important thing that all the part which from a customer‘s view is „internal to the provider of the service“ (behind the CF address) is responsibility of the provider of the service, no matter what 3rd party services they use.

Yeah. I believe Cloudflare basically has its heart in the right place but it is is still a dangerous central choke point.

My take is: Any data worth your while shouldn’t just rely on HTTPs anyway. You should have more layers of encryption. That’s how majority of the companies do it.

And for people who do not even know this, are better off using CF as MITM.

Because it’s not always about the encryption. I use Cloudflare tunnels because they are a good way of exposing sites to the internet without exposing my IP or opening ports, which means I don’t have to worry as much about DDoS or other attacks and therefore I don’t need to spend as much effort defending against them.

Even Cloudflare decides to inspect my traffic (and seriously why would they care about a tiny hobbyist website) it’s not like it gives them full access to everything, there are other controls you can use depending what your site is for.

Honestly what I don’t understand is why some on this sub have such strong objections to Cloudflare. Like I get they are a terrible company in a lot of ways, but name a tech company that isn’t?

Because it's everyones MITM. I trust them with security because it's the only thing they focus on, I focus on making my stuff stop randomly shutting down. If absolutely everyone is using it, I don't care too much if an issue appears- nobody cares about my tiny little thing when Discord goes through Cloudflare

Mostly they know how cf work but when asking simplicity cf do it

In regard to enterprises, they don’t give a rats ass about any potential intellectual property theft. That risk has been written off. What matters is compliance and security.

Not having DDOS protection in place can potentially have legal consequences and can be very costly. DDOS protection is either investing millions of dollars in equipment or offloading that responsibility to a company like Cloudflare.

Because it's easier and cheaper than setting up your own SSL tunnel securely.

From a non hobbyists point of view, you're paying for them to handle the messy business of maintaining a secure endpoint on the Internet. The sheer amount of bot crap you get hitting your servers as a result of an open SSL port is crazy. Also you are paying for their services as a CDN, which can significantly improve latency and reduce bandwidth bills.

Most self hosters won't benefit from a CDN (the volume and global distribution of traffic is too small for it to make much of a difference) or a global internal transit network.

Of course you definitely can set up your own SSL terminating proxy (where you own the box/process that unencrypted traffic goes through), it's just a lot more money and effort to do well than most would be willing to dedicate to it. But if you're not ok with your traffic going through a third party maybe it's worth it.

Just the mechanics of setting up SSL termination is a faff. Not only do you need to set up SSL properly on your app servers, you also have to do the same on your terminating proxy - and keep the certs renewed, disable insecure configurations, patch your SSL implementation. For many, the convenience of this all being someone else's problem is worth it compared to the privacy implications.

It's not entirely true what you said. I use cloudflare -> my Proxyserver -> my machines behind the Proxyserver

My Proxyserver has my own certificates loaded and terminates the SSL/TLS connection from cloudflare

Even if the data is passing through cloudflare cdn uses the cloudflare certificates my data is encrypted first using my own certificates from the Proxyserver

They think it's not a problem for them. Because they think that:

• they have nothing to hide
• they don't think CF (or TLAs who have access) will use it against them. (Possible examples: Ukrainian sites, Russian sites who disagree with goverment on at least some things)
• they think alternatives are worse - it's...rather difficult to make CF censor you.
• they only use CF's DNS services and not other things
• It's just easier this way

​

This reminds me of current situation with "AI": There is OpenAI/Anthropic with their APIs (requests are sent via HTTPS but OpenAI/Anthropic are not only need to have access to do their work - they also censor it). There are paid-for alternatives who either host proxies for OpenAI/Anthropic/others (like OpenRouter.ai) or host local models for others (hosting require significant resources which will be unusused if you don't query often). There are means to host locally at home if you can. Some people prefer not to use local hosting even when they can do so.

I mean, we trust Root Certification Authorities, which are basically self-proclamed-as-trusted entities. At least CF became widespread and is community-trusted :)

It's all a matter of trust.
There are many reasons to selfhosting. Paranoia is just one of them.

Half of the people don't remotely understand the issue. The other half is aware that what's in behind isn't trustworthy anyways if it's "in da cloud" and just went all YOLO-mode.

People go out of their way to de-Google their phones but them are ok with this situation.

I don't think this venn-diagram is a circle.

Cloudflare’s default setup is to proxy your traffic but that’s easily disabled with a click of the admin’s mouse. Of course disabling their proxy service exposes the origin IP’s, server certs, etc. but the point is that you use Cloudflare services the way you want to; it’s not a Boolean “cloudflare or no Cloudflare”.

Beyond what everyone else has said here about it being practically an industry standard now with insane levels of trust, it also foists a lot of the responsibility for security/uptime onto an external company with a good track record. That's great in the eyes of product management and likely the legal department too.

Do you want to be blown off the internet by DDoS? How much bandwidth do you have/can you pay for?

You could say the same about any cloud provider. "AWS can read all my data! The horror!"

Don’t forget, for selfhosters, the value proposition of free is always pretty strong. I have tiers of data and not everything needs to be super private at all times.

The sites I expose to Cloudflare were already being publicly hosted for my friends. Anything actually private or sensitive I run via private DNS and Wireguard internally.

I'm either reading this wrong or there's a disconnect in knowledge. If you have your own SSL cert and do the termination of that on your end, CF cannot do any MITM without an error on the user's end.

However, if your just setting up an a record or whatever to your server that isn't doing ssl termination, then yes they are mitm