All posts by Sam Rhea

Cloudflare named in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-sse-gartner-magic-quadrant-2024


Gartner has once again named Cloudflare to the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge (SSE) report1. We are excited to share that Cloudflare is one of only ten vendors recognized in this report. For the second year in a row, we are recognized for our ability to execute and the completeness of our vision. You can read more about our position in the report here.

Last year, we became the only new vendor named in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SSE. We did so in the shortest amount of time as measured by the date since our first product launched. We also made a commitment to our customers at that time that we would only build faster. We are happy to report back on the impact that has had on customers and the Gartner recognition of their feedback.

Cloudflare can bring capabilities to market quicker, and with greater cost efficiency, than competitors thanks to the investments we have made in our global network over the last 14 years. We believe we were able to become the only new vendor in 2023 by combining existing advantages like our robust, multi-use global proxy, our lightning-fast DNS resolver, our serverless compute platform, and our ability to reliably route and accelerate traffic around the world.

We believe we advanced further in the SSE market over the last year by building on the strength of that network as larger customers adopted Cloudflare One. We took the ability of our Web Application Firewall (WAF) to scan for attacks without compromising speed and applied that to our now comprehensive Data Loss Prevention (DLP) approach. We repurposed the tools that we use to measure our own network and delivered an increasingly mature Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX) suite for administrators. And we extended our Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) toolset to scan more applications for new types of data.

We are grateful to the customers who have trusted us on this journey so far, and we are especially proud of our customer reviews in the Gartner® Peer Insights™ panel as those customers report back on their experience with Cloudflare One. The feedback has been so consistently positive that Gartner named Cloudflare a Customers’ Choice2 for 2024. We are going to make the same commitment to you today that we made in 2023: Cloudflare will only build faster as we continue to build out the industry’s best SSE platform.

What is a Security Service Edge?

A Security Service Edge (SSE) “secures access to the web, cloud services and private applications. Capabilities include access control, threat protection, data security, security monitoring, and acceptable-use control enforced by network-based and API-based integration. SSE is primarily delivered as a cloud-based service, and may include on-premises or agent-based components.”3

The SSE solutions in the market began to take shape as companies dealt with users, devices, and data leaving their security perimeters at scale. In previous generations, teams could keep their organization safe by hiding from the rest of the world behind a figurative castle-and-moat. The firewalls that protected their devices and data sat inside the physical walls of their space. The applications their users needed to reach sat on the same intranet. When users occasionally left the office they dealt with the hassle of backhauling their traffic through a legacy virtual private network (VPN) client.

This concept started to fall apart when applications left the building. SaaS applications offered a cheaper, easier alternative to self-hosting your resources. The cost and time savings drove IT departments to migrate and security teams had to play catch up as all of their most sensitive data also migrated.

At the same time, users began working away from the office more often. The rarely used VPN infrastructure inside an office suddenly struggled to stay afloat with the new demands from more users connecting to more of the Internet.

As a result, the band-aid boxes in an organization failed — in some cases slowly and in other situations all at once. SSE vendors offer a cloud-based answer. SSE providers operate their own security services from their own data centers or on a public cloud platform. Like the SaaS applications that drove the first wave of migration, these SSE services are maintained by the vendor and scale in a way that offers budget savings. The end user experience improves by avoiding the backhaul and security administrators can more easily build smarter, safer policies to defend their team.

The SSE space covers a broad category. If you ask five security teams what an SSE or Zero Trust solution is, you’ll probably get six answers. In general, SSE provides a helpful framing that gives teams guard rails as they try to adopt a Zero Trust architecture. The concept breaks down into a few typical buckets:

  • Zero Trust Access Control: protect applications that hold sensitive data by creating least-privilege rules that check for identity and other contextual signals on each and every request or connection.
  • Outbound Filtering: keep users and devices safe as they connect to the rest of the Internet by filtering and logging DNS queries, HTTP requests, or even network-level traffic.
  • Secure SaaS Usage: analyze traffic to SaaS applications and scan the data sitting inside of SaaS applications for potential Shadow IT policy violations, misconfigurations, or data mishandling.
  • Data Protection: scan for data leaving your organization or for destinations that do not comply with your organization’s policies. Find data stored inside your organization, even in trusted tools, that should not be retained or needs tighter access controls.
  • Employee Experience: monitor and improve the experience that your team members have when using tools and applications on the Internet or hosted inside your own organization.

The SSE space is a component of the larger Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market. You can think of the SSE capabilities as the security half of SASE while the other half consists of the networking technologies that connect users, offices, applications, and data centers. Some vendors only focus on the SSE side and rely on partners to connect customers to their security solutions. Other companies just provide the networking pieces. While today’s announcement highlights our SSE capabilities, Cloudflare offers both components as a comprehensive, single-vendor SASE provider.

How does Cloudflare One fit into the SSE space?

Customers can rely on Cloudflare to solve the entire range of security problems represented by the SSE category. They also can just start with a single component. We know that an entire “digital transformation” can be an overwhelming prospect for any organization. While all the use cases below work better together, we make it simple for teams to start by just solving one problem at a time.

Zero Trust access control

Most organizations begin that problem-solving journey by attacking their virtual private network (VPN). In many cases, a legacy VPN operates in a model where anyone on that private network is trusted by default to access anything else. The applications and data sitting on that network become vulnerable to any user who can connect. Augmenting or replacing legacy VPNs is one of the leading Zero Trust use cases we see customers adopting, in part to eliminate pains related to the ongoing series of high-impact VPN vulnerabilities in on-premises firewalls and gateways.

Cloudflare provides teams with the ability to build Zero Trust rules that replace the security model of a traditional VPN with one that evaluates every request and connection for trust signals like identity, device posture, location, and multifactor authentication method. Through Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), administrators can make applications available to employees and third-party contractors through a fully clientless option that makes traditional tools feel just like SaaS applications. Teams that need more of a private network can still build one on Cloudflare that supports arbitrary TCP, UDP, and ICMP traffic, including bidirectional traffic, while still enforcing Zero Trust rules.

Cloudflare One can also apply these rules to the applications that sit outside your infrastructure. You can deploy Cloudflare’s identity proxy to enforce consistent and granular policies that determine how team members log into their SaaS applications, as well.

DNS filtering and Secure Web Gateway capabilities

Cloudflare operates the world’s fastest DNS resolver, helping users connect safely to the Internet whether they are working from a coffee shop or operating inside some of the world’s largest networks.

Beyond just DNS filtering, Cloudflare also provides organizations with a comprehensive Secure Web Gateway (SWG) that inspects the HTTP traffic leaving a device or entire network. Cloudflare filters each request for dangerous destinations or potentially malicious downloads. Besides SSE use cases, Cloudflare operates one of the largest forward proxies in the world for Internet privacy used by Apple iCloud Private Relay, Microsoft Edge Secure Network, and beyond.

You can also mix-and-match how you want to send traffic to Cloudflare. Your team can decide to send all traffic from every mobile device or just plug in your office or data center network to Cloudflare’s network. Each request or DNS query is logged and made available for review in our dashboard or can be exported to a 3rd party logging solution.

In-line and at-rest CASB

SaaS applications relieve IT teams of the burden to host, maintain, and monitor the tools behind their business. They also create entirely new headaches for corresponding security teams.

Any user in an enterprise now needs to connect to an application on the public Internet to do their work, and some users prefer to use their favorite application rather than the ones vetted and approved by the IT department. This kind of Shadow IT infrastructure can lead to surprise fees, compliance violations, and data loss.

Cloudflare offers comprehensive scanning and filtering to detect when team members are using unapproved tools. With a single click, administrators can block those tools outright or control how those applications can be used. If your marketing team needs to use Google Drive to collaborate with a vendor, you can apply a quick rule that makes sure they can only download files and never upload. Alternatively, allow users to visit an application and read from it while blocking all text input. Cloudflare’s Shadow IT policies offer easy-to-deploy controls over how your organization uses the Internet.

Beyond unsanctioned applications, even approved resources can cause trouble. Your organization might rely on Microsoft OneDrive for day-to-day work, but your compliance policies prohibit your HR department from storing files with employee Social Security numbers in the tool. Cloudflare’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) can routinely scan the SaaS applications your team relies on to detect improper usage, missing controls, or potential misconfiguration.

Digital Experience Monitoring

Enterprise users have consumer expectations about how they connect to the Internet. When they encounter delays or latency, they turn to IT help desks to complain. Those complaints only get louder when help desks lack the proper tools to granularly understand or solve the issues.

Cloudflare One provides teams with a Digital Experience Monitoring toolkit that we built based on the tools we have used for years inside of Cloudflare to monitor our own global network. Administrators can measure global, regional, or individual latency to applications on the Internet. IT teams can open our dashboard to troubleshoot connectivity issues with single users. The same capabilities we use to proxy approximately 20% of the web are now available to teams of any size, so they can help their users.

Data security

The most pressing concern we have heard from CIOs and CISOs over the last year is the fear around data protection. Whether data loss is malicious or accidental, the consequences can erode customer trust and create penalties for the business.

We also hear that deploying any sort of effective data security is just plain hard. Customers tell us anecdotes about expensive point solutions they purchased with the intention to implement them quickly and keep data safe, that ultimately just didn’t work or slowed down their teams to the point that they became shelfware.

We have spent the last year aggressively improving our solution to that problem as the single largest focus area of investment in the Cloudflare One team. Our data security portfolio, including data loss prevention (DLP), can now scan for data leaving your organization, as well as data stored inside your SaaS applications, and prevent loss based on exact data matches that you provide or through fuzzier patterns. Teams can apply optical character recognition (OCR) to find potential loss in images, scan for public cloud keys in a single click, and software companies can rely on predefined ML-based source code detections.

Data security will continue to be our largest area of focus in Cloudflare One over the next year. We are excited to continue to deliver an SSE platform that gives administrators comprehensive control without interrupting or slowing down their users.

Beyond the SSE

The scope of an SSE solution captures a wide range of the security problems that plague enterprises. We also know that issues beyond that definition can compromise a team. In addition to offering an industry-leading SSE platform, Cloudflare gives your team a full range of tools to protect your organization, to connect your team, and to secure all of your applications.

IT compromise tends to start with email. The majority of attacks begin with some kind of multi-channel phishing campaign or social engineering attack sent to the largest hole in any organization’s perimeter: their employees’ email inboxes. We believe that you should be protected from that too, even before the layers of our SSE platform kick in to catch malicious links or files from those emails, so Cloudflare One also features best-in-class cloud email security. The capabilities just work with the rest of Cloudflare One to help stop all phishing channels — inbox (cloud email security), social media (SWG), SMS (ZTNA together with hard keys), and cloud collaboration (CASB). For example, you can allow team members to still click on potentially malicious links in an email while forcing those destinations to load in an isolated browser that is transparent to the user.

Most SSE solutions stop there, though, and only solve the security challenge. Team members, devices, offices, and data centers still need to connect in a way that is performant and highly available. Other SSE vendors partner with networking providers to solve that challenge while adding extra hops and latency. Cloudflare customers don’t have to compromise. Cloudflare One offers a complete WAN connectivity solution delivered in the same data centers as our security components. Organizations can rely on a single vendor to solve how they connect and how they do so securely. No extra hops or invoices needed.

We also know that security problems do not distinguish between what happens inside your enterprise and the applications you make available to the rest of the world. You can secure and accelerate the applications that you build to serve your own customers through Cloudflare, as well. Analysts have also recognized Cloudflare’s Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) platform, which protects some of the world’s largest Internet destinations.

How does that impact customers?

Tens of thousands of organizations trust Cloudflare One to secure their teams every day. And they love it. Over 200 enterprises have reviewed Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform as part of Gartner® Peer Insights™. As mentioned previously, the feedback has been so consistently positive that Gartner named Cloudflare a Customers’ Choice for 2024.

We talk to customers directly about that feedback, and they have helped us understand why CIOs and CISOs choose Cloudflare One. For some teams, we offer a cost-efficient opportunity to consolidate point solutions. Others appreciate that our ease-of-use means that many practitioners have set up our platform before they even talk to our team. We also hear that speed matters to ensure a slick end user experience when we are 46% faster than Zscaler, 56% faster than Netskope, and 10% faster than Palo Alto Networks.

What’s next?

We kicked off 2024 with a week focused on new security features that teams can begin deploying now. Looking ahead to the rest of the year, you can expect additional investment as we add depth to our Secure Web Gateway product. We also have work underway to make our industry-leading access control features even easier to use. Our largest focus areas will include our data protection platform, digital experience monitoring, and our in-line and at-rest CASB tools. And stay tuned for an overhaul to how we surface analytics and help teams meet compliance needs, too.

Our commitment to our customers in 2024 is the same as it was in 2023. We are going to continue to help your teams solve more security problems so that you can focus on your own mission.

Ready to hold us to that commitment? Cloudflare offers something unique among the leaders in this space — you can start using nearly every feature in Cloudflare One right now at no cost. Teams of up to 50 users can adopt our platform for free, whether for their small team or as part of a larger enterprise proof of concept. We believe that organizations of any size should be able to start their journey to deploy industry-leading security.

***

1Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge, By Charlie Winckless, Thomas Lintemuth, Dale Koeppen, April 15, 2024
2Gartner, Voice of the Customer for Zero Trust Network Access, By Peer Contributors, 30 January 2024
3https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/security-service-edge-sse

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, MAGIC QUADRANT and PEER INSIGHTS are registered trademarks and The GARTNER PEER INSIGHTS CUSTOMERS’ CHOICE badge is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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Cloudflare is deprecating Railgun

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original http://blog.cloudflare.com/deprecating-railgun/

Cloudflare is deprecating Railgun

Cloudflare is deprecating Railgun

Cloudflare will deprecate the Railgun product on January 31, 2024. At that time, existing Railgun deployments and connections will stop functioning. Customers have the next eight months to migrate to a supported Cloudflare alternative which will vary based on use case.

Cloudflare first launched Railgun more than ten years ago. Since then, we have released several products in different areas that better address the problems that Railgun set out to solve. However, we shied away from the work to formally deprecate Railgun.

That reluctance led to Railgun stagnating and customers suffered the consequences. We did not invest time in better support for Railgun. Feature requests never moved. Maintenance work needed to occur and that stole resources away from improving the Railgun replacements. We allowed customers to deploy a zombie product and, starting with this deprecation, we are excited to correct that by helping teams move to significantly better alternatives that are now available in Cloudflare’s network.

We know that this will require migration effort from Railgun customers over the next eight months. We want to make that as smooth as possible. Today’s announcement features recommendations on how to choose a replacement, how to get started, and guidance on where you can reach us for help.

What is Railgun?

Cloudflare’s reverse proxy secures and accelerates your applications by placing a Cloudflare data center in over 285+ cities between your infrastructure and your audience. Bad actors attempting to attack your applications hit our network first where products like our WAF and DDoS mitigation service stop them. Your visitors and users connect to our data centers where our cache can serve them content without the need to reach all the way back to your origin server.

For some customers, your infrastructure also runs on Cloudflare’s network in the form of Cloudflare Workers. Others maintain origin servers running on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a hyperscale public cloud. In those cases, Cloudflare needs to connect to that infrastructure to grab new content that our network can serve from our cache to your audience.

However, some content cannot be cached. Dynamically-generated or personalized pages can change for every visitor and every session. Cloudflare Railgun aimed to solve that by determining what was the minimum amount of content that changed and attempting to only send that difference in an efficient transfer – a form of delta compression. By reducing the amount of content that needed to be sent to Cloudflare’s network, we could accelerate page loads for end users.

Railgun accomplishes this goal by running a piece of software inside the customer’s environment, the Railgun listener, and a corresponding service running in Cloudflare’s network, the Railgun sender. The pair establish a permanent TCP connection. The listener keeps track of the most recent version of a page that was requested. When a request arrives for a known page, the listener sends an HTTP request to the origin server, determines what content changed, and then compresses and sends only the delta to the sender in Cloudflare’s network.

Why deprecate a product?

The last major release of Railgun took place eight years ago in 2015. However, products should not be deprecated just because active development stops. We believe that a company should retire a product only when:

  • the maintenance impacts the ability to focus on solving new problems for customers and
  • when improved alternatives exist for customers to adopt in replacement.

Hundreds of customers still use Railgun today and the service has continued to run over the last decade without too much involvement from our team. That relative stability deterred us from pushing customers to adopt newer technologies that solved the same problems. As a result, we kept Railgun in a sort of maintenance mode for the last few years.

Why deprecate Railgun now?

Cloudflare’s network has evolved in the eight years since the last Railgun release. We deploy hardware and run services in more than 285 cities around the world, nearly tripling the number of cities since Railgun was last updated. The hardware itself also advanced, becoming more efficient and capable.

The software platform of Cloudflare’s network developed just as fast. Every data center in Cloudflare’s network can run every service that we provide to our customers. These services range from our traditional reverse proxy products to forward proxy services like Zero Trust to our compute and storage platform Cloudflare Workers. Supporting such a broad range of services requires a platform that can adapt to the requirements of the evolving needs of these products.

Maintaining Railgun, despite having better alternatives, creates a burden on our ability to continue investing in new solutions. Some of these tools that power Railgun are themselves approaching an end of life state. Others will likely present security risks that we are not comfortable accepting in the next few years.

We considered several options before deciding on deprecation. First, we could accept the consequences of inaction, leaving our network in a worse state and our Railgun customers in purgatory. Second, we could run Railgun on dedicated infrastructure and silo it from the rest of our network. However, that would violate our principle that every piece of hardware in Cloudflare runs every service.

Third, we could spin up a new engineering team and rebuild Railgun from scratch in a modern way. Doing so would take away from resources we could otherwise invest in newer technologies. We also believe that existing, newer products from Cloudflare solve the same problems that Railgun set out to address. Rebuilding Railgun would take away from our ability to keep shipping and would duplicate better features already released in other products. As a result, we have decided to deprecate Railgun.

What alternatives are available?

Railgun addressed a number of problems for our customers at launch. Today, we have solutions available that solve the same range of challenges in significantly improved ways.

We do not have an exact like-for-like successor for Railgun. The solutions that solve the same set of problems have also evolved with our customers. Different use cases that customers deploy Railgun to address will map to different solutions available in Cloudflare today. We have broken out some of the most common reasons that customers used Railgun and where we recommend they consider migrating.

“I use Railgun to maintain a persistent, secure connection to Cloudflare’s network without the need for a static publicly available IP address.”
Customers can deploy Cloudflare Tunnel to connect their infrastructure to Cloudflare’s network without the need to expose a public IP address. Cloudflare Tunnel software runs in your environment, similar to the Railgun listener, and creates an outbound-only connection to Cloudflare’s network. Cloudflare Tunnel is available at no cost.

“I use Railgun to front multiple services running in my infrastructure.”
Cloudflare Tunnel can be deployed in this type of bastion mode to support multiple services running behind it in your infrastructure. You can use Tunnel to support services beyond just HTTP servers, and you can deploy replicas of the Cloudflare Tunnel connector for high availability.

“I use Railgun for performance improvements.”
Cloudflare has invested significantly in performance upgrades in the eight years since the last release of Railgun. This list is not comprehensive, but highlights some areas where performance can be significantly improved by adopting newer services relative to using Railgun.

  • Cloudflare Tunnel features Cloudflare’s Argo Smart Routing technology, a service that delivers both “middle mile” and last mile optimization, reducing round trip time by up to 40%. Web assets using Argo perform, on average, 30% faster overall.
  • Cloudflare Network Interconnect (CNI) gives customers the ability to directly connect to our network, either virtually or physically, to improve the reliability and performance of the connection between Cloudflare’s network and your infrastructure. CNI customers have a dedicated on-ramp to Cloudflare for their origins.

“I use Railgun to reduce the amount of data that egresses from my infrastructure to Cloudflare.”
Certain public cloud providers charge egregious egress fees for you to move your own data outside their environment. We believe that degrades an open Internet and locks in customers. We have spent the last several years investing in ways to reduce or eliminate these altogether.

  • Members of the Bandwidth Alliance mutually agree to waive transfer fees. If your infrastructure runs in Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Backblaze and more than a dozen other providers you pay zero cost to send data to Cloudflare.
  • Cloudflare’s R2 storage product requires customers to pay zero egress fees as well. R2 provides global object storage with an S3-compatible API and easy migration to give customers the ability to build multi-cloud architectures.

What is the timeline?

From the time of this announcement, customers have eight months available to migrate away from Railgun. January 31, 2024, will be the last day that Railgun connections will be supported. Starting on February 1, 2024, existing Railgun connections will stop functioning.

Over the next few days we will prevent new Railgun deployments from being created. Zones with Railgun connections already established will continue to function during the migration window.

How can I get help?

Contract customers can reach out to their Customer Success team to discuss additional questions or migration plans. Each of Cloudflare’s regions has a specialist available to help guide teams who need additional help during the migration.

Customers can also raise questions and provide commentary in this dedicated forum room. We will continue to staff that discussion and respond to questions as customers share them.

What’s next?

Railgun customers will also receive an email notice later today about the deprecation plan and timeline. We will continue sending email notices multiple times over the next eight months leading up to the deprecation.

We are grateful to the Railgun customers who first selected Cloudflare to accelerate the applications and websites that power their business. We are excited to share the latest Cloudflare features with them that will continue to make them faster as they reach their audience.

A complete suite of Zero Trust security tools to get the most from AI

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original http://blog.cloudflare.com/zero-trust-ai-security/

A complete suite of Zero Trust security tools to get the most from AI

This post is also available in French, Spanish, German.

A collection of tools from Cloudflare One to help your teams use AI services safely

A complete suite of Zero Trust security tools to get the most from AI

Cloudflare One gives teams of any size the ability to safely use the best tools on the Internet without management headaches or performance challenges. We’re excited to announce Cloudflare One for AI, a new collection of features that help your team build with the latest AI services while still maintaining a Zero Trust security posture.

Large Language Models, Larger Security Challenges

A Large Language Model (LLM), like OpenAI’s GPT or Google’s Bard, consists of a neural network trained against a set of data to predict and generate text based on a prompt. Users can ask questions, solicit feedback, and lean on the service to create output from poetry to Cloudflare Workers applications.

The tools also bear an uncanny resemblance to a real human. As in some real-life personal conversations, oversharing can become a serious problem with these AI services. This risk multiplies due to the types of use cases where LLM models thrive. These tools can help developers solve difficult coding challenges or information workers create succinct reports from a mess of notes. While helpful, every input fed into a prompt becomes a piece of data leaving your organization’s control.

Some responses to tools like ChatGPT have been to try and ban the service outright; either at a corporate level or across an entire nation. We don’t think you should have to do that. Cloudflare One’s goal is to allow you to safely use the tools you need, wherever they live, without compromising performance. These features will feel familiar to any existing use of the Zero Trust products in Cloudflare One, but we’re excited to walk through cases where you can use the tools available right now to allow your team to take advantage of the latest LLM features.

Measure usage

SaaS applications make it easy for any user to sign up and start testing. That convenience also makes these tools a liability for IT budgets and security policies. Teams refer to this problem as “Shadow IT” – the adoption of applications and services outside the approved channels in an organization.

In terms of budget, we have heard from early adopter customers who know that their team members are beginning to experiment with LLMs, but they are not sure how to approach making a commercial licensing decision. What services and features do their users need and how many seats should they purchase?

On the security side, the AIs can be revolutionary for getting work done but terrifying for data control policies. Team members treat these AIs like sounding boards for painful problems. The services invite users to come with their questions or challenges. Sometimes the context inside those prompts can contain sensitive information that should never leave an organization. Even if teams select and approve a single vendor, members of your organization might prefer another AI and continue to use it in their workflow.

Cloudflare One customers on any plan can now review the usage of AIs. Your IT department can deploy Cloudflare Gateway and passively observe how many users are selecting which services as a way to start scoping out enterprise licensing plans.

A complete suite of Zero Trust security tools to get the most from AI

Administrators can also block the use of these services with a single click, but that is not our goal today. You might want to use this feature if you select ChatGPT as your approved model, and you want to make sure team members don’t continue to use alternatives, but we hope you don’t block all of these services outright. Cloudflare’s priority is to give you the ability to use these tools safely.

Control API access

When our teams began experimenting with OpenAI’s ChatGPT service, we were astonished by what it already knew about Cloudflare. We asked ChatGPT to create applications with Cloudflare Workers or guide us through how to configure a Cloudflare Access policy and, in most cases, the results were accurate and helpful.

In some cases the results missed the mark. The AIs were using outdated information, or we were asking questions about features that had only launched recently. Thankfully, these AIs can learn and we can help. We can train these models with scoped inputs and connect plug-ins to provide our customers with better AI-guided experiences when using Cloudflare services.

We heard from customers who want to do the same thing and, like us, they need to securely share training data and grant plug-in access for an AI service. Cloudflare One’s security suite extends beyond human users and can give teams the ability to securely share Zero Trust access to sensitive data over APIs.

First, teams can create service tokens that external services must present to reach data made available through Cloudflare One. Administrators can provide these tokens to systems making API requests and log every single request. As needed, teams can revoke these tokens with a single click.

A complete suite of Zero Trust security tools to get the most from AI

After creating and issuing service tokens, administrators can create policies to allow specific services access to their training data. These policies will verify the service token and can be extended to verify country, IP address or an mTLS certificate. Policies can also be created to require human users to authenticate with an identity provider and complete an MFA prompt before accessing sensitive training data or services.

A complete suite of Zero Trust security tools to get the most from AI

When teams are ready to allow an AI service to connect to their infrastructure, they can do so without poking holes in their firewalls by using Cloudflare Tunnel. Cloudflare Tunnel will create an encrypted, outbound-only connection to Cloudflare’s network where every request will be checked against the access rules configured for one or more services protected by Cloudflare One.

A complete suite of Zero Trust security tools to get the most from AI

Cloudflare’s Zero Trust access control gives you the ability to enforce authentication on each and every request made to the data your organization decides to provide to these tools. That still leaves a gap in the data your team members might overshare on their own.

Restrict data uploads

Administrators can select an AI service, block Shadow IT alternatives, and carefully gate access to their training material, but humans are still involved in these AI experiments. Any one of us can accidentally cause a security incident by oversharing information in the process of using an AI service – even an approved service.

We expect AI playgrounds to continue to evolve to feature more data management capabilities, but we don’t think you should have to wait for that to begin adopting these services as part of your workflow. Cloudflare’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) service can provide a safeguard to stop oversharing before it becomes an incident for your security team.

First, tell us what data you care about. We provide simple, preconfigured options that give you the ability to check for things that look like social security numbers or credit card numbers. Cloudflare DLP can also scan for patterns based on regular expressions configured by your team.

A complete suite of Zero Trust security tools to get the most from AI

Once you have defined the data that should never leave your organization, you can build granular rules about how it can and cannot be shared with AI services. Maybe some users are approved to experiment with projects that contain sensitive data, in which case you can build a rule that only allows an Active Directory or Okta group to upload that kind of information while everyone else is blocked.

A complete suite of Zero Trust security tools to get the most from AI

Control use without a proxy

The tools in today’s blog post focus on features that apply to data-in-motion. We also want to make sure that misconfigurations in the applications don’t lead to security violations. For example, the new plug-in feature in ChatGPT brings the knowledge and workflows of external services into the AI interaction flow. However, that can also lead to the services behind plug-ins having more access than you want to.

Cloudflare’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) scans your SaaS applications for potential issues that can occur when users make changes. Whether alerting you to files that someone accidentally just made public on the Internet to checking that your GitHub repositories have the right membership controls, Cloudflare’s CASB removes the manual effort required to check each and every setting for potential issues in your SaaS applications.

Available soon, we are working on new integrations with popular AI services to check for misconfigurations. Like most users of these services, we’re still learning more about where potential accidents can occur, and we are excited to provide administrators who use our CASB with our first wave of controls for AI services.

What’s next?

The usefulness of these tools will only accelerate. The ability of AI services to coach and generate output will continue to make it easier for builders from any background to create the next big thing.

We share a similar goal. The Cloudflare products focused on helping users build applications and services, our Workers platform, remove hassles like worrying about where to deploy your application or how to scale your services. Cloudflare solves those headaches so that users can focus on creating. Combined with the AI services, we expect to see thousands of new builders launch the next wave of products built on Cloudflare and inspired by AI coaching and generation.

We have already seen dozens of projects flourish that were built on Cloudflare Workers using guidance from tools like ChatGPT. We plan to launch new integrations with these models to make this even more seamless, bringing better Cloudflare-specific guidance to the chat experience.

We also know that the security risk of these tools will grow. We will continue to bring functionality into Cloudflare One that aims to stay one step ahead of the risks as they evolve with these services. Ready to get started? Sign up here to begin using Cloudflare One at no cost for teams of up to 50 users.

Cloudflare One named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-sse-gartner-magic-quadrant/

Cloudflare One named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Cloudflare One named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Gartner has recognized Cloudflare in the 2023 “Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge (SSE)” report for its ability to execute and completeness of vision. We are excited to share that the Cloudflare Zero Trust solution, part of our Cloudflare One platform, is one of only ten vendors recognized in the report.

Of the 10 companies named to this year’s Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ report, Cloudflare is the only new vendor addition. You can read more about our position in the report and what customers say about using Cloudflare One here.

Cloudflare is also the newest vendor when measured by the date since our first products in the SSE space launched. We launched Cloudflare Access, our best-in-class Zero Trust access control product, a little less than five years ago. Since then, we have released hundreds of features and shipped nearly a dozen more products to create a comprehensive SSE solution that over 10,000 organizations trust to keep their organizations data, devices and teams both safe and fast. We moved that quickly because we built Cloudflare One on top of the same network that already secures and accelerates large segments of the Internet today.

We deliver our SSE services on the same servers and in the same locations that serve some of the world’s largest Internet properties. We combined existing advantages like the world’s fastest DNS resolver, Cloudflare’s serverless compute platform, and our ability to route and accelerate traffic around the globe. We might be new to the report, but customers who select Cloudflare One are not betting on an upstart provider; they are choosing an industry-leading solution made possible by a network that already secures millions of destinations and billions of users every day.

We are flattered by the recognition from Gartner this week and even more thrilled by the customer outcomes we make possible today. That said, we are not done and we are only going faster.

What is a Security Service Edge?

A Security Service Edge (SSE) “secures access to the web, cloud services and private applications. Capabilities include access control, threat protection, data security, security monitoring, and acceptable-use control enforced by network-based and API-based integration. SSE is primarily delivered as a cloud-based service, and may include on-premises or agent-based components.”1

The SSE space developed to meet organizations as they encountered a new class of security problems. Years ago, teams could keep their devices, services, and data safe by hiding from the rest of the world behind a figurative castle-and-moat. The defense perimeter for an enterprise corresponded to the literal walls of their office. Applications ran in server closets or self-managed data centers. Businesses could deploy firewalls, proxies, and filtering appliances in the form of on-premise hardware. Remote users suffered through the setup by backhauling their traffic through the physical office with a legacy virtual private network (VPN) client.

That model began to break down when applications started to leave the building. Teams began migrating to SaaS tools and public cloud providers. They could no longer control security by placing physical appliances in the flow of their one path to the Internet.

Meanwhile, users also left the office, placing stress on the ability of a self-managed private network to scale with the traffic. Performance and availability suffered while costs increased as organizations carried more traffic and deployed more bandaids to try and buy time.

Bad actors also evolved. Attacks became more sophisticated and exploited the migration away from a classic security perimeter. The legacy appliances deployed could not keep up with the changes in attack patterns and scale of attacks.

SSE vendors provide organizations with a cloud-based solution to those challenges. SSE providers deploy and maintain security services in their own points of presence or in a public cloud provider, giving enterprises a secure first hop before they connect to the rest of the Internet or to their internal tools. IT teams can deprecate the physical or virtual appliances that they spent days maintaining. Security teams benefit from filtering and policies that update constantly to defend against new threats.

Some SSE features target remote access replacement by offering customers the ability to connect users to internal tools with Zero Trust access control rules. Other parts of an SSE platform focus on applying Zero Trust scrutiny to the rest of the Internet, replacing the on-premise filtering appliances of an enterprise with cloud-based firewalls, resolvers, and proxies that filter and log traffic leaving a device closer to the user instead of forcing a backhaul to a centralized location.

What about SASE?

You might also be familiar with the term Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). We hear customers talk about their “SASE” goals more often than “SSE” alone. SASE extends the definition of SSE to include managing the connectivity of the traffic being secured. Network-as-a-Service vendors help enterprises connect their users, devices, sites, and services. SSE providers secure that traffic.

Cloudflare One named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Most vendors focus on one side of the equation. Network-as-a-service companies sell software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), interconnection, and traffic optimization solutions to help enterprises manage and accelerate connectivity, but those enterprises wind up losing those benefits by sending all that traffic to an SSE provider for filtering. SSE providers deliver security tools for traffic of nearly any type, but they still need customers to buy additional networking services to get that traffic to their locations.

Cloudflare One is a single vendor SASE platform. Cloudflare offers enterprises a comprehensive network-as-a-service where teams can send all traffic to Cloudflare’s network, where we can help teams manage connectivity and improve performance. Enterprises can choose from flexible on-ramps, like their existing hardware routers, agents running on laptops and mobile devices, physical and virtual interconnects, or Cloudflare’s own last mile connector.

When that traffic reaches Cloudflare’s network, our SSE services apply security filtering in the same locations where we manage and route connectivity. Cloudflare’s SSE solution does not add additional hops; we deliver filtering and logging in-line with the traffic we accelerate for our customers. The value of our single vendor SASE solution is just another outcome of an obsession we’ve had since we first launched our reverse proxy over ten years ago: customers should not have to compromise performance for security and vice versa.

So where does Cloudflare One fit?

Cloudflare One connects enterprises to the tools they need while securing their devices, applications and data without compromising on performance. The platform consists of two primary components: our Cloudflare Zero Trust products, which represent our SSE offering, and our network-as-a-service solution. As much as today’s announcement separates out those features, we prefer to talk about how they work together.

Cloudflare’s network-as-a-service offering, our Magic WAN solution, extends our network for customers to use as their own. Enterprises can take advantage of the investments we have made over more than a decade to build out one of the world’s most peered, most performant, and most available networks. Teams can connect individual roaming devices, offices and physical sites, or entire networks and data centers through Cloudflare to the rest of the Internet or internal destinations.

We want to make it as easy as possible for customers to send us their traffic, so we provide many flexible “on-ramps” to easily fit into their existing infrastructure. Enterprises can use our roaming agent to connect user devices, our Cloudflare Tunnel service for application-level connectivity, network-level tunnels from our Magic WAN Connector or their existing router or SD-WAN hardware, and/or direct physical or virtual interconnections for dedicated connectivity to on-prem or cloud infrastructure at 1,600+ locations around the world. When packets arrive at the closest Cloudflare location, we provide optimization, acceleration and logging to give customers visibility into their traffic flows.

Instead of sending that accelerated traffic to an additional intermediary for security filtering, our Cloudflare Zero Trust platform can take over to provide SSE security filtering in the same location – generally on the exact same server – as our network-as-a-service functions. Enterprises can pick and choose what SSE features they want to enable to strengthen their security posture over time.

Cloudflare One and the SSE feature set

The security features inside of Cloudflare One provide comprehensive SSE coverage to enterprises operating at any scale. Customers just need to send traffic to a Cloudflare location within a few milliseconds of their users and Cloudflare Zero Trust handles everything else.

Cloudflare One named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Cloudflare One SSE Capabilities

Zero Trust Access Control
Cloudflare provides a Zero Trust VPN replacement for teams that host and control their own resources. Customers can deploy a private network inside of Cloudflare’s network for more traditional connectivity or extend access to contractors without any agent required. Regardless of how users connect, and for any type of destination they need, Cloudflare’s network gives administrators the ability to build granular rules on a per-resource or global basis. Teams can combine one or more identity providers, device posture inputs, and other sources of signal to determine when and how a user should be able to connect.

Organizations can also extend these types of Zero Trust access control rules to the SaaS applications where they do not control the hosting by introducing Cloudflare’s identity proxy into the login flow. They can continue to use their existing identity provider but layer on additional checks like device posture, country, and multifactor method.

DNS filtering
Cloudflare’s DNS filtering solution runs on the world’s fastest DNS resolver, filtering and logging the DNS queries leaving individual devices or some of the world’s largest networks.

Network firewall
Organizations that maintain on-premise hardware firewalls or cloud-based equivalents can deprecate their boxes by sending traffic through Cloudflare where our firewall-as-a-service can filter and log traffic. Our Network Firewall includes L3-L7 filtering, Intrusion Detection, and direct integrations with our Threat Intelligence feeds and the rest of our SSE suite. It enables security teams to build sophisticated policies without any of the headaches of traditional hardware: no capacity or redundancy planning, no throughput restrictions, no manual patches or upgrades.

Secure Web Gateway
Cloudflare’s Secure Web Gateway (SWG) service inspects, filters, and logs traffic in a Cloudflare PoP close to a user regardless of where they work. The SWG can block HTTP requests bound for dangerous destinations, scan traffic for viruses and malware, and control how traffic routes to the rest of the Internet without the need for additional hardware or virtualized services.

In-line Cloud Access Security Broker and Shadow IT
The proliferation of SaaS applications can help teams cut costs but poses a real risk; sometimes users prefer tools other than the ones selected by their IT or Security teams. Cloudflare’s in-line Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) gives administrators the tools to make sure employees use SaaS applications as intended. Teams can build tenant control rules that restrict employees from logging into personal accounts, policies that only allow file uploads of certain types to approved SaaS applications, and filters that restrict employees from using unapproved services.

Cloudflare’s “Shadow IT” service scans and catalogs user traffic to the Internet to help IT and Security teams detect and monitor the unauthorized use of SaaS applications. For example, teams can ensure that their approved cloud storage is the only place where users can upload materials.

API-driven Cloud Access Security Broker
Cloudflare’s superpower is our network, but sometimes the worst attacks start with data sitting still. Teams that adopt SaaS applications can share work products and collaborate together from any location; that same convenience makes it simple for mistakes or bad actors to cause a serious data breach.

In some cases, employees might overshare a document with sensitive information by selecting the wrong button in the “Share” menu. With just one click, a spreadsheet with customer contact data could become public on the Internet. In other situations, users might share a report with their personal account without realizing they just violated internal compliance rules.

Regardless of how the potential data breach started, Cloudflare’s API-driven CASB constantly scans the SaaS applications that your team uses for potential misconfiguration and data loss. Once detected, Cloudflare’s CASB will alert administrators and provide a comprehensive guide to remediating the incident.

Data Loss Prevention
Cloudflare’s Data Loss Prevention service scans traffic to detect and block potential data loss. Administrators can select from common precreated profiles, like social security numbers or credit card numbers, or create their own criteria using regular expressions or integrate with existing Microsoft Information Protection labels.

Remote Browser Isolation
Cloudflare’s browser isolation service runs a browser inside of our network, in a data center just milliseconds from the user, and sends the vector rendering of the web page to the local device. Team members can use any modern browser and, unlike other approaches, the Internet just feels like the Internet. Administrators can isolate sites on the fly, choosing to only isolate unknown destinations or providing contractors with an agentless workstation. Security teams can add additional protection like blocking copy-paste or printing.

Security beyond the SSE

Many of the customers who talk to us about their SSE goals are not ready to begin adopting every security service in the category from Day 1. Instead, they tend to have strategic SSE goals and tactical immediate problems. That’s fine. We can meet customers wherever they begin on their journey and sometimes that journey starts with pain points that sit just a bit outside of the current SSE definition. We can help in those areas, too.

Many of the types of attacks that an SSE model aims to prevent begin with email, but that falls outside of the traditional SSE definition. Attackers will target specific employees or entire workforces with phishing links or malware that the default filtering available from email providers today miss.

We want to help customers stop these attacks at the inbox before SSE features like DNS or SWG filtering need to apply. Cloudflare One includes industry-leading email security through our Area 1 product to protect teams regardless of their email provider. Area 1 is not just a standalone solution bundled into our SSE; Cloudflare Zero Trust features work better together alongside Area 1. Suspicious emails can open links in an isolated browser, for example, to give customers a defense-in-depth security model without the risk of more IT help desk tickets.

Cloudflare One customers can also take advantage of another Gartner-recognized platform in Cloudflare, our application security suite. Cloudflare’s industry-leading application security features, like our Web Application Firewall and DDoS mitigation service, can be deployed in-line with our Zero Trust security features. Teams can add bot management alerts, API protection, and faster caching to their internal tools with a single click.

Why Cloudflare?

Over 10,000 organizations trust Cloudflare One to connect and secure their enterprise. Cloudflare One helps protect and accelerate teams from the world’s largest IT organization, the US Federal Government, to thousands of small groups who rely on our free plan. A couple of months ago we spoke with customers as part of our CIO Week to listen to the reasons they select Cloudflare One. Their feedback followed a few consistent themes.

1) Cloudflare One delivers more complete security
Nearly every SSE vendor offers improved security compared to a traditional castle-and-moat model, but that is a low bar. We built the security features in Cloudflare One to be best in class. Our industry-leading access control solution provides more built-in options to control who can connect to the tools that power your business.

We partner leading identity providers and endpoint protection platforms, like Microsoft and CrowdStrike, to provide a Zero Trust VPN replacement that is better than anything else on the market. On the outbound filtering side, every filtering option relies on threat intelligence gathered and curated by Cloudforce One, our dedicated threat research team.

2) Cloudflare One makes your team faster
Cloudflare One accelerates your end users from the first moment they connect to the Internet by starting with the world’s fastest DNS resolver. End users send those DNS queries and establish connectivity over a secure tunnel optimized based on feedback from the millions of users who rely on our popular consumer forward proxy. Entire sites connect through a variety of tunnel options to Cloudflare’s network where we are the fastest connectivity provider for the most number of the world’s 3,000 largest networks.

We compete and measure ourselves against pure connectivity providers. When we measure ourselves against pure SSE providers, like Zscaler, we significantly outperform by 38% to 59% depending on use case.

3) Cloudflare One is easier to manage
The Cloudflare Zero Trust products are unique in the SSE market in that we offer a free plan that covers nearly every feature. We make these services available at no cost to groups of up to 50 users because we believe that security on the Internet should be accessible to anyone on any budget.

A consequence of that commitment is that we built products that have to be easy to use. Unlike other SSE providers who only sell to the enterprise and can rely on large systems integrators for deployment, we had to create a solution that any team could deploy. From human rights organizations without full-time IT departments to start ups who want to spend more time building and less time worrying about vulnerabilities.

We also know that administrators want more options than just an intuitive dashboard. We provide API support for managing every Cloudflare One feature, and we maintain a Terraform provider for teams that need the option for peer reviewed configuration-as-code management.

4) Cloudflare One is the most cost-efficient comprehensive SASE offering
Cloudflare is responsible for delivering and securing millions of websites on the Internet every day. To support that volume of traffic, we had to build our network for scale and cost-efficiency.

The largest enterprises’ internal network traffic does not (yet) match the volume of even moderately popular Internet properties. When those teams send traffic to Cloudflare One, we rely on the same hardware and the same data centers that power our application services business to apply security and networking features. As a result, we can help deliver comprehensive security to any team at a price point that is made possible by our existing investment in our network.

5) Cloudflare can be your single, consolidated security vendor
Cloudflare One is only the most recent part of the Cloudflare platform to be recognized in industry analyst reports. In 2022 Gartner named Cloudflare a Leaderin Web Application and API Protection (WAAP). When customers select Cloudflare to solve their SSE challenges, they have the opportunity to add best-in-class solutions all from the same vendor.

Dozens of independent analyst firms continue to recognize Cloudflare for our ability to deliver results to our customers on services ranging from DDoS protection, CDN and edge computing to bot management.

What’s next?

When customers choose Cloudflare One, they trust our network to secure the most sensitive aspects of their enterprise without slowing down their business. We are grateful to the more than 10,000 organizations who have selected us as their vendor in the last five years, from small teams on our free plan to Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.

Today’s announcement only accelerates the momentum in Cloudflare One. We are focused on building the next wave of security and connectivity features our customers need to focus on their own mission. We’re going to keep going faster to help more and more organizations. Want to get started on that journey with us? Let us know here and we’ll reach out.

Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge”, Analyst(s): Charlie Winckless, Aaron McQuaid, John Watts, Craig Lawson, Thomas Lintemuth, Dale Koeppen, April 10, 2023.

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1https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/security-service-edge-sse

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Why do CIOs choose Cloudflare One?

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-cios-select-cloudflare-one/

Why do CIOs choose Cloudflare One?

Why do CIOs choose Cloudflare One?

Cloudflare’s first customers sought us out as the “Web Application Firewall vendor” or their DDoS-mitigating Content Delivery Network. We earned their trust by solving their problems in those categories and dozens of others. Today, over 100,000 customers now rely on Cloudflare to secure and deliver their Internet properties.

However, our conversations with CIOs evolved over the last few years. The discussions stopped centering around a specific product. CIOs, and CSOs too, approached us with the challenge of managing connectivity and security for their entire enterprise. Whether they described their goals as Zero Trust or Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), their existing appliances and point solutions could no longer keep up. So we built Cloudflare One to help them.

Today, over 10,000 organizations trust Cloudflare One to connect and secure their users, devices, applications, and data. As part of CIO Week, we spoke with the leaders of some of our largest customers to better understand why they selected Cloudflare.

The feedback centered around six themes:

  1. Cloudflare One delivers more complete security.
  2. Cloudflare One makes your team faster.
  3. Cloudflare One is easier to manage.
  4. Cloudflare One products work better together.
  5. Cloudflare One is the most cost-efficient comprehensive SASE offering.
  6. Cloudflare can be your single security vendor.

If you are new to Cloudflare, or more familiar with our Internet property products, we’re excited to share how other customers approached this journey and why they partnered with Cloudflare. Today’s post breaks down their feedback in serious detail. If you’d prefer to ask us directly, skip ahead to the bottom, and we’d be glad to find time to chat.

Cloudflare One delivers more complete security

The first SASE conversations we had with customers started when they asked us how we keep Cloudflare safe. Their Internet properties relied on us for security and availability – our own policies mattered to their decisions to trust us.

That’s fair. We are a popular target for attack. However, we could not find anything on the market that could keep us safe without slowing us down. Instead, we decided to use our own network to connect employees to internal resources and secure how those same team members connected to the rest of the Internet.

After learning what we built to replace our own private network, our customers started to ask if they could use it too. CIOs were on the same Zero Trust journey with us. They trusted our commitment to delivering the most comprehensive security on the market for their public-facing resources and started partnering with us to do the same thing for their entire enterprise.

We kept investing in Cloudflare One over the last several years based on feedback from our own internal teams and those CIOs. Our first priority was to replace our internal network with a model that applies Zero Trust controls by default. We created controls that could adapt to the demands of security teams without the need to modify applications. We added rules to force hard keys on certain applications, restrict access to specific countries, or require users to ask for approval from an administrator. The flexibility meant that every request, and every connection, could be scrutinized in a way that matched the sensitivity of internal tools.

We then turned that skepticism in the other direction. Customers on this journey with us asked “how could we have Zero Trust in the rest of the Internet?” To solve that, we turned Cloudflare’s network in the other direction. We built our DNS filtering product by combining the world’s fastest DNS resolver with our unique view into threat patterns on the Internet. We layered on a comprehensive Secure Web Gateway and network firewall. We sent potentially risky sites to Cloudflare’s isolated browser, a unique solution that pushes the industry forward in terms of usability.

More recently, we started to create tools that help control the data sitting in SaaS applications and to prevent sensitive data from leaving the enterprise. We’ve been delighted to watch customers adopt every stage in this progression with us, but we kept comparing notes with other CIOs and CSOs about the risk of something that most vendors do not consider part of the SASE stack: email.

We also spent so many hours monitoring email-based phishing attacks aimed at Cloudflare. To solve that challenge, we deployed Area 1 Email Security. The efficacy of Area 1 stunned our team to the point that we acquired the company, so we could offer the same security to our customers as part of Cloudflare One.

When CIOs describe the security challenges they need to solve, we can recommend a complete solution built on our experience addressing those same concerns. We cannot afford shortcuts in how we secure Cloudflare and know they cannot either in how they keep their enterprises safe.

Zero Trust security at a social media company

Like Cloudflare, social media services are a popular target for attack. When the security team at one of the world’s most prominent social media platforms began a project to overhaul their access controls, they ran a comprehensive evaluation of vendors who could keep their platform safe from phishing attacks and lateral movement. They selected Cloudflare One due to the granular access control our network provides and the layers of security policies that can be evaluated on any request or connection without slowing down end users.

Cloudflare One makes your team faster

Many of our customers start with our Application Services products, like our cache and smart routing, because they have a need for speed. The performance of their Internet properties directly impacts revenue. These customers hunt down opportunities to use Cloudflare to shave off milliseconds.

The CIOs who approach us to solve their SASE problems tend to rank performance lower than security and maintainability. In early conversations they describe their performance goals as “good enough that my users do not complain.”

Those complaints drive IT help desk tickets, but CIOs are used to sacrificing speed for security. We don’t believe they should have to compromise. CIOs select Cloudflare One because the performance of our network improves the experience of their end users and reduces overhead for their IT administrators.

We accelerate your users from the first moment they connect. When your team members visit a destination on the Internet, their experience starts with a DNS query to find the address of the website. Cloudflare runs the world’s fastest DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, and the DNS filtering features of our SASE offering use the same technology.

Next, your users’ devices open a connection and send an HTTP request to their destination. The Cloudflare agent on their device does so by using a BoringTun, our Rust-based and open sourced WireGuard implementation. WireGuard allows us to provide a highly-performant on-ramp to the Internet through our network without compromising battery life or security. The same technology supports the millions of users who choose to use our WARP consumer offering. We take their feedback and optimize WARP constantly to improve how our enterprise users connect.

Finally, your users rely on our network to connect them to their destination and return the responses. Out of the 3,000 top networks in the world, measured by IPv4 addresses advertised, we rank the fastest in 1,310. Once connected, we apply our smart routing technology to route users through our network to find the fastest path to and from their destination.

We develop new technologies to improve the speed of Cloudflare One, but we cannot change the speed of light. Instead, we make the distance shorter by bringing websites closer to your users. Cloudflare is the reverse proxy for more than 20% of the HTTP Internet. We serve those websites from the same data centers where your employees connect to our Secure Web Gateway. In many cases, we can deliver content from a server centimeters away from where we apply Cloudflare One’s filtering, shaving off milliseconds and reducing the need for more hops.

Faster DNS filtering for the United States Federal Government

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) works within the United States Department of Homeland Security as the “nation’s risk advisor.”1 Last year they launched a program to find a protective DNS resolver for the civilian government. These agencies and departments operate around the country, in large cities and rural areas, and they need a solution that would deliver fast DNS resolutions close to where those users sit. After a thorough evaluation, they selected Cloudflare, in partnership with Accenture Federal Services, as the country’s protective DNS resolver.

Performance at a Fortune 500 Energy Company

An American energy company attempted to deploy Zscaler, but became frustrated after spending eight months attempting to integrate and maintain systems that slowed down their users. This organization already observed Cloudflare’s ability to accelerate their traffic with our network-layer DDoS protection product and ran a pilot with Cloudflare One. Following an exhaustive test, the team observed significant performance improvements, particularly with Cloudflare’s isolated browser product, and decided to rip out Zscaler and consolidate around Cloudflare.

Cloudflare One products are easier to manage

The tools that a SASE solution like Cloudflare One replaces are cumbersome to manage. Hardware appliances or virtual equivalents require upfront deployment work and ongoing investment to maintain and upgrade them. Migrating to other cloud-based SASE vendors can reduce pain for some IT teams, but that is a low bar.

CIOs tell us that the ability to manage the solution is nearly as important as the security outcomes. If their selected vendor is difficult to deploy, the migration drags on and discourages adoption of more advanced features. If the solution is difficult to use or manage, team members find ways to avoid using it or IT administrators waste time.

We built Cloudflare One to make the most advanced SASE technologies available to teams of any size, including those that lack full IT departments. We invested in building a system that could be configured and deployed without operational overhead. Over 10,000 teams rely on Cloudflare One as a result. That same commitment to ease-of-use extends to the enterprise IT and Security teams who manage Cloudflare One deployments for some of the world’s largest organizations.

We also provide features tailored to the feedback we hear from CIOs and their teams about the unique challenges of managing larger deployments at global scale. In some cases, their teams need to update hundreds of policies or their global departments rely on dozens of administrators who need to coordinate changes. We provide API support for managing every Cloudflare One feature, and we also maintain a Terraform provider for teams that need the option for peer reviewed configuration-as-code management.

Ease-of-use at a Fortune 500 telecommunications provider

We make our free and pay-as-you-go plans available to anyone with a credit card in order to make these technologies accessible to teams of any size. Sometimes, the largest teams in the world start with those plans too. A European Fortune 500 telecommunications company began adopting our Zero Trust platform on a monthly subscription when their Developer Operations (DevOps) lost their patience with their existing VPN. Developers across their organization complained about how their legacy private network slowed down their access to the tools they needed to do their job.

Their DevOps administrators adopted Cloudflare One after being able to set it up in a matter of minutes without talking to a sales rep at Cloudflare. Their company now relies on Cloudflare One to secure their internal resources and their path to the Internet for over 100,000 employees.

Cloudflare One products work better together

CIOs who start their SASE evaluation often attempt to replace a collection of point solutions. The work to glue together those products demands more time from IT departments and the gaps between those tools present security blind spots.

However, many SASE vendors offer a platform that just cobbles together point solutions. There might be one invoice, but the same pain points remain around interoperability and security challenges. We talk to CIOs and CSOs who expand their vendor search radius after realizing that the cloud-based alternative from their existing hardware provider still includes those challenges.

When CIOs select Cloudflare One, they pick a single, comprehensive SASE solution. We don’t believe that any feature, or product, should be an island. The sum should be greater than the parts. Every capability that we build in Cloudflare One adds more value to what is already available without adding more maintenance overhead.

When an organization secures their applications behind our Zero Trust access control, they can enable Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) to run in-line with a single button. Users who click on an unknown link open that website in our isolated browser without any additional steps. Launching soon, the same Data Loss Prevention (DLP) rules that administrators build for data-in-transit filters will apply to data sitting at rest with our API-driven Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB).

Product integration at national residential services provider

Just a few months ago, a US-based national provider of residential services, like plumbing and climate control repair, selected Cloudflare One because they could consolidate their disparate stack of existing cloud-based security vendors into a single solution. After evaluating other vendors who stitch together point solutions under a single brand name, they found more value in deploying Cloudflare’s Zero Trust network access solution together with our outbound filtering products for thousands of employees.

Cloudflare One is the most cost-efficient comprehensive SASE offering

Some CIOs approach Cloudflare to replace their collection of hardware appliances that perform, or attempt to perform, Zero Trust functions. The decision to migrate to a cloud-based solution can deliver immediate cost savings by eliminating the cost to continue to license and maintain that hardware or by avoiding the need for new capital expenditure to purchase the latest generation of hardware that can better attempt to support SSE Goals.

We’re happy to help you throw out those band-aid boxes. We’ve spent the last decade helping over 100,000 organizations get rid of their hardware in favor of a faster, safer, and more cost-efficient solution. However, we have seen CIOs approach us in the last with a newer form of this problem: renewals. CIOs who first adopted a cloud-based SSE solution two or three years ago now describe extortionate price increases from their existing vendors.

Unlike Cloudflare, many of these vendors rely on dedicated appliances that struggle to scale with increased traffic. To meet that demand, they purchased more appliances and now need to find a way to bake that cost into the price they charge existing and new customers. Other vendors rely on public cloud providers to run their services. As those providers increase their costs, these vendors pass them on to their customers at a rate that scales with usage.

Cloudflare’s network provides a different model that allows Cloudflare One to deliver a comprehensive SASE offering that is more cost-efficient than anything in the market. Rather than deploying dedicated appliances, Cloudflare deploys commodity hardware on top of which any Cloudflare service can run allowing us to scale up and down for any use case from our Bot Management features to our Workers, including our SASE products. We also purchase server hardware from multiple vendors in the exact same configuration, providing us with supply chain flexibility and reducing the risk that any one component from a specific vendor drives up our hardware costs.

We obsess over the efficiency of the computing costs of that hardware because we have no choice – over 20% of the world’s HTTP Internet relies on it today. Since every service can run on every server, including Cloudflare One, that investment in computing efficiency also benefits Cloudflare One. We also avoid the need to buy more hardware specifically for Cloudflare One capacity. We built our network to scale with the demands of some of the world’s largest Internet properties. That model allows us to absorb the traffic spikes of any enterprise SASE deployment without noticing.

However, Cloudflare One, like all of our network-driven products, has another cost component: transit. We need to reliably deliver your employee’s traffic to its destination. While that destination is increasingly on our network already if it uses our reverse proxy, sometimes employees need other websites.

Thankfully we’ve spent the last decade reducing or eliminating the cost of transit. In many cases, our reverse proxy motivates exchanges and ISPs to waive transit fees for us. It is in their best interest to provide their users with the fastest, most reliable, path to the ever-increasing number of websites that use our network. When we turn our network in the other direction for our SASE customers we still benefit from the same savings.

Cost-savings at an African infrastructure company

Earlier this year, an infrastructure based in South Africa came to Cloudflare with this exact problem. Their existing cloud-based Secure Web Gateway vendor, Zscaler, insisted on a significant price increase for the same services and threatened to turn off the system if the customer did not agree. Instead, this infrastructure company already trusted our network for their Internet properties and decided to rip out their existing SASE vendor in favor of Cloudflare One’s more cost-efficient model without the loss of any functionality.

Cloudflare can be your single security and connectivity vendor

We hear from more and more CIOs who want to reduce the number of invoices they pay and vendors they manage. Hundreds of enterprises who have adopted our SASE platform started as customers of our Application Services and Application Security products.

We’ve seen this take two forms. In one form, CIOs describe the challenge of stitching together multiple security point solutions into a single SASE deployment. They choose our network for the reasons described above; the CIO’s team benefits from features that work better together, and they avoid the need to maintain multiple systems.

In the second form, the migration to more cloud-based services across use cases ranging from SASE to public cloud infrastructure led to vendor bloat. We hear from customers who struggle to inventory which vendors their team has purchased and which of those services they even use.

That proliferation of vendors introduces more cost in terms of dollars and time. In financial terms, each vendor’s contract model might introduce new fees, like fixed platform costs, that would be redundant when paying for a single vendor. In management terms, every new vendor adds one more account manager to go find during issues or one more vendor to involve when debugging an issue that could impact multiple systems.

Bundling Cloudflare One with our Application Services, and Application Security allows your organization to rely on a single vendor for every connection that you need to secure and accelerate. Your teams can rely on a single control plane for everything from customizing your website’s cache rules to reviewing potential gaps in your Zero Trust deployment. CIOs have one point of contact, a Cloudflare Customer Success Manager, they can reach out to if they need help escalating a request across what used to require dozens of potential vendors.

Vendor consolidation at a 10,000 person research publication company

A large American data analytics company chose Cloudflare One as part of that same journey. They first sought Cloudflare to help load-balance their applications and protect their sites from DDoS attacks. After becoming familiar with our platform, and learning how performance features they used for their public-facing applications could be delivered to their internal resources, they selected Cloudflare One over Zscaler and Cisco.

What’s next?

Not every CIO shares the same motivations. One of the reasons above might be more important to you based on your business, your industry, or your stage in a Zero Trust adoption journey.

That’s fine by us! We’d love to learn more about what drives your search and how we can help. We have a team dedicated to listening to organizations who are evaluating SASE options and helping them understand and experiment with Cloudflare One. If you’d like to get started, let us know here, and we’ll reach out.

Do you prefer to avoid talking to someone just yet? Nearly every feature in Cloudflare One is available at no cost for up to 50 users. Many of our largest enterprise customers start by exploring the products themselves on our free plan, and we invite you to do so by following the link here.

……
1https://www.cisa.gov/about-cisa

Cloudflare Zero Trust for Project Galileo and the Athenian Project

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-zero-trust-for-galileo-and-athenian/

Cloudflare Zero Trust for Project Galileo and the Athenian Project

This post is also available in 日本語, Deutsch, Français, Español.

Cloudflare Zero Trust for Project Galileo and the Athenian Project

The organizations served by Projects Galileo and Athenian face the same security challenges as some of the world’s largest companies, but lack the budget to protect themselves. Sophisticated phishing campaigns attempt to compromise user credentials. Bad actors find ways to disrupt connectivity to critical resources. However, the tools to defend against these threats have historically only been available to the largest enterprises.

We’re excited to help fix that. Starting today, we are making the Cloudflare One Zero Trust suite available to teams that qualify for Project Galileo or Athenian at no cost. Cloudflare One includes the same Zero Trust security and connectivity solutions used by over 10,000 customers today to connect their users and safeguard their data.

Same problem, different missions

Athenian Project candidates work to safeguard elections in the United States. Project Galileo applicants launched their causes to support journalists, encourage artistic expression, or protect persecuted groups. They each set out to fix difficult and painful problems. None of the applications to our programs wrote their mission statement to deal with phishing attacks or internal data loss.

However, security problems plague these teams. Instead of being able to focus on their unique mission, these groups spend money, time, and energy attempting to defend from attacks. The headaches range from expensive distractions to outright breaches. Even the mundane work to connect employees to important tools continues to be a headache. Every chore or incident takes away from the ability of these organizations to advance their cause.

We built Cloudflare One to solve the common security problems that can derail any team. Our mission is to help build a better Internet and, in doing so, we create tools that allow the groups served by the Athenian Project and Project Galileo spend as much of their day solving their own unique challenges.

The products we are making available today provide security against a broad, and growing, range of attacks that target how a team works together on the Internet. Project Galileo and Athenian candidates can choose to start in any place depending on their existing security challenges. If you need a guide on where to get started, we’ve broken down three common first steps that we recommend.

1) Stop phishing attacks

Many phishing attacks start with a malicious link buried in a single email from a sender that seems trustworthy. A user in your organization clicks on that link, believing it to be from a teammate or manager, and lands on a website that looks almost identical to your identity provider or one of the web applications they use every day. They input their username and password, sending their credentials directly to the attacker.

Cloudflare One’s email security, our Area 1 product, is our first line of phishing defense. Area 1 scans the emails headed to your organization for the presence of potential phishing campaigns and other types of security attacks. Malicious messages never arrive without interrupting the emails that your team should receive. You can deploy Area 1 in minutes with a few changes to your DNS records to safeguard your Microsoft 365, Gmail, or nearly any other email deployment.

As part of today’s announcement, we are making Area 1 available to Project Galileo and Athenian organizations at no cost. The same level of protection trusted by large corporations from Werner Enterprises to Fortune 500 consumer packaged goods firms is now available to your team.

In some cases, an email evades detection or the phishing link reaches your users through other channels. Cloudflare One can still help. When your team members navigate the Internet, they rely on DNS queries made by their device in order to translate the hostname of a website to the IP address of the server. Their device sends those queries to a DNS resolver.

Cloudflare runs the world’s fastest DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, and we offer a security version that also filters DNS queries made to destinations that are known to be malicious. If a user accidentally clicks on a link from a text message or in a website, their device first sends that DNS query to Cloudflare. If dangerous, we stop the query before the malicious destination can load. If benign, we’ll respond with the destination faster than other resolvers.

Cloudflare’s DNS filtering keeps the US Federal Government safe, but can be deployed by teams of any size. You can secure entire office networks with the change of one router setting or deploy our roaming agent to keep your users safe wherever they work. Together with email protection, your team can filter out phishing attacks in a defense-in-depth approach.

2) Connect employees and partners

Many teams that qualify for Project Galileo had to find ways to work across geographies long before the pandemic sent employees home from other companies. These teams typically deployed a legacy virtual private network (VPN) to allow team members from across the world to reach the tools they needed to collect data, file stories, or submit research. At best, those VPN deployments slowed down user connectivity and introduced maintenance headaches. At worst, they gave anyone on the network overly broad access to nearly any resource.

With Cloudflare One, your team can operate in any location and still reach your internal tools while controlling exactly who can access which application or service. Organizations that need to operate a traditional private network can run one on Cloudflare by deploying our device client (WARP) on user endpoints and establishing outbound connections to our global network via Cloudflare Tunnel. Users enjoy the performance and availability of Cloudflare’s network while administrators can build granular permissions without the need for additional application development.

We also know that many Galileo and Athenian organizations work alongside hundreds or thousands of partners and volunteers. Those users need to also reach internal resources but are not willing or able to install software on their personal devices.

To solve that challenge, Cloudflare One can be deployed in a fully clientless mode that can use multiple identity providers including consumer options like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Users authenticate with the single-sign on option they already use from any mobile or desktop device. Administrators control which users can reach specific applications while logging every attempt.

3) Secure your team’s path to the Internet

Beyond phishing attacks, bad actors target organizations with other types of threats like malware hidden in downloads. Researchers and journalists exploring a topic with untrusted sources can bring ransomware back into the entire organization. Team members connecting to the Internet from a hotel Wi-Fi network can have unencrypted DNS queries monitored and reported.

Cloudflare One provides every member of your team with an encrypted, secured on-ramp to the entire Internet. Powered by the same Cloudflare WARP agent that helps millions of users enjoy a more private Internet connection, Cloudflare’s Secure Web Gateway filters all Internet-bound for hidden threats.

When users inadvertently connect to a malicious destination, Cloudflare One will block the attempt and present them with a page explaining what just happened. In the other direction, Cloudflare’s network scans downloads for malware and blocks the download before the user can open it.

The same filtering can be extended to keep sensitive data from leaving your organization. You can build rules that flag file uploads that contain personal information or patterns that are unique to your team or focus area. With just a few clicks, you can create policies that prevent the accidental or malicious loss of data while also restricting uploads to approved destinations.

All without the need for an enterprise IT department

Today’s announcement makes the security technology deployed by the world’s largest enterprises available to organizations of any size. And, despite the broad impact of Athenian and Galileo organizations, that size tends to be smaller.

The teams supported by Project Galileo focus limited resources on advancing journalism, artistic expression, human rights, and other causes. The state and local governments who qualify for the Athenian Project spend their days protecting democracy in the United States. Both groups tend to lack the resources of a Fortune 500 to staff and operate a large IT department.

We built Cloudflare One as a service that a team could configure and deploy in a matter of hours and still benefit from comprehensive Zero Trust security. We’ve published a Zero Trust Roadmap that your team can use to determine how to get started with guidelines for the time required at each step.

How to get started

We’re excited to extend Projects Galileo and Athenian to include Cloudflare One. Are you an existing qualified organization or interested in applying? Follow the link here and here to get started.

If you are not part of Project Galileo or Athenian, but still want to begin deploying Cloudflare One, we make the service available at no cost to teams of up to 50 users. Click here to sign up.

Adding a CASB to Cloudflare Zero Trust

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-zero-trust-casb/

Adding a CASB to Cloudflare Zero Trust

Earlier today, Cloudflare announced that we have acquired Vectrix, a cloud-access security broker (CASB) company focused on solving the problem of control and visibility in the SaaS applications and public cloud providers that your team uses.

We are excited to welcome the Vectrix team and their technology to the Cloudflare Zero Trust product group. We don’t believe a CASB should be a point solution. Instead, the features of a CASB should be one component of a comprehensive Zero Trust deployment. Each piece of technology, CASB included, should work better together than they would as a standalone product.

We know that this migration is a journey for most customers. That’s true for our own team at Cloudflare, too. We’ve built our own Zero Trust platform to solve problems for customers at any stage of that journey.

Start by defending the resources you control

Several years ago, we protected the internal resources that Cloudflare employees needed by creating a private network with hardware appliances. We deployed applications in a data center and made them available to this network. Users inside the San Francisco office connected to a secure Wi-Fi network that placed them on the network.

For everyone else, we punched a hole in that private network and employees pretended they were in the office by using Virtual Private Network (VPN) clients on their device. We had created a castle-and-moat by attempting to extend the walls of the San Francisco office to the rest of the world.

Our Security team hated this. Once authenticated to the VPN client, a user could generally connect to any destination on our private network – the network trusted them by default. We lacked segmentation over who could reach what resource. Just as terrifying, we had almost no visibility into what was happening inside the network.

One option would have been to build out a traditional segmented network with internal firewalls and a configuration nightmare keeping VPN appliances, firewalls and servers synchronized. We knew that there was a better, more flexible, more modern way.

We built the first product in Cloudflare One, Cloudflare Access, to solve these problems. Cloudflare Access uses our global network to check every request or connection for identity, group membership, device posture, multifactor method and more to determine if it should be allowed. Organizations can build rules that are specific to applications or IP addresses on a private network that runs on Cloudflare. Cloudflare Access also logs every request and connection, providing high-visibility with low-effort.

Adding a CASB to Cloudflare Zero Trust

This migration changed our security model at Cloudflare. We also never had to compromise performance thanks to Cloudflare’s global network and Application Performance products. Decisions about who is allowed are made milliseconds away from the user in data centers in over 250+ cities around the world. For web applications, Cloudflare Access runs in-line with our WAF and works out-of-the-box with our load balancers. Cloudflare’s network accelerates requests and packets, connecting users to the tools they need even faster.

Cloudflare Access let us and thousands of other teams deprecate the legacy VPN security model, but the rest of the Internet posed a different kind of challenge—how do we keep our users, and their devices and data, safe from attack?

Next, protect your team from the rest of the Internet

The public Internet allows just about anyone to connect either as a user or a host. That openness is both powerful and terrifying. When employees on corporate devices need to use the rest of the Internet, they run a risk of encountering phishing websites, malware hosts, and other attempts to steal data and compromise businesses.

Historically, organizations relied on a similar castle-and-moat approach. They backhauled user traffic to any destination on the Internet through a centralized data center. Inside that data center, IT departments installed and monitored physical appliances to provide security like network firewalls, proxies, and secure web gateways.

This model worked fine when employees only needed to connect to the public Internet occasionally. Most work was performed on the desktop in front of the user. When companies began moving to SaaS applications hosted by other teams, and employees spent the majority of their day on the Internet, this security framework fell apart.

User experience suffered when all traffic had to first reach a distant security appliance. IT and Security teams had to maintain and patch appliances while struggling to scale up or down. The cost of backhauling traffic over MPLS links erased the financial savings gained by migrating to SaaS applications on the Internet.

Adding a CASB to Cloudflare Zero Trust

Cloudflare Gateway turns Cloudflare’s network in the other direction to protect users as they connect out to the rest of the Internet. Instead of backhauling traffic to a centralized location, users connect to a nearby Cloudflare data center where we apply one or more layers of security filtering and logging before accelerating their traffic to its final destination.

Customers can choose how they want to start this journey. Cloudflare operates the world’s fastest DNS resolver, on top of which we’ve built DNS filtering powered by the intelligence we collect from handling so much of the Internet every day. Other customers decide to begin by ripping out their network firewall appliances and moving that functionality into Cloudflare’s network by connecting roaming users or entire offices and data centers to Cloudflare.

As threats become more advanced, Cloudflare’s Secure Web Gateway inspects HTTPS traffic for malware hiding in file downloads or the accidental loss of data to unapproved SaaS services. Cloudflare’s Browser Isolation service adds another layer of threat protection by running the browser in our network instead of on the user device. With Cloudflare Gateway and Browser Isolation, security teams also can apply granular data loss control to traffic as it flows through our network—from stopping file uploads to blocking copy-and-paste in the web page itself.

Now, control the data and configurations in your SaaS applications

At this point in a Zero Trust journey, your team can control how users access critical resources and how you keep those users and their data safe from external attack. Both of these require control of the network—inspecting traffic as it leaves devices in your organization or as it arrives in your infrastructure. That leaves one piece missing. As more of your data lives in SaaS applications outside your control, how do you maintain a consistent level of filtering, logging, and auditing?

The Cloudflare Zero Trust platform released many features in the last year to help customers solve this problem and the broader range of “CASB” challenges. First, we built a feature that allows your team to force logins to your SaaS applications through Cloudflare’s Secure Web Gateway where you can control rules and visibility. Next, we used the data from the Secure Web Gateway to provide your team with a comprehensive Shadow IT report to discover what applications your team is using and what they should be using.

Customers use the Shadow IT report in particular to begin building rules to block access to unapproved SaaS applications, or to block actions like file uploads to specific unapproved SaaS applications, but the collaboration available in these tools becomes a risk to your organization.

It’s easy to be a single-click away from a data breach. We could share a document with the public Internet instead of our team. We could leave an S3 bucket unprotected. We could invite the wrong users to a private GitHub repository or install a malicious plugin to our email system. The data-at-rest in these SaaS applications is vulnerable to new types of attacks.

Some of these applications have tried to solve this problem in their own space, but the rapid adoption of SaaS applications and the struggle to configure each separately led to thousands of wasted hours in security teams. The Vectrix founders talked with teams who had to dedicate full-time employees just to manually configure and check permission settings and logs. So they built a better answer.

Adding a CASB to Cloudflare Zero Trust

Vectrix scans the SaaS applications that your team uses to detect anomalies in configuration, permissions, and sharing. Each SaaS application is different – the risks vary from a Google Sheet that is made public to leaked secrets in GitHub – and Vectrix gives customers a single place to control and audit those types of events.

Why Vectrix?

To solve this problem for our customers, we evaluated options including building our own API-driven CASB solution and talking to other companies in this space. Vectrix became the best option after evaluating them against the priorities we have for this group of products.

The Vectrix team is customer obsessed

Vectrix mission focuses on giving organizations of any size, including those without a large security team, “simple, straightforward security scans that anyone can use…” By making the solution accessible and easy to use, Vectrix reduces the barrier to security.

We share that same goal. Cloudflare exists to help build a better Internet. That starts with an Internet made safer by making security tools accessible to anyone. From offering SSL certificates at no cost to any customer to making Zero Trust product group available at no cost to teams of up to 50 users, we are obsessed with helping our customers solve problems previously out of their reach.

Their technology delivers value faster

One of the original pitches of Cloudflare’s Application Security and Performance products was set up that could be completed in less than five minutes. We know that the cost to deploy a new service, especially for smaller teams, can mean that organizations delay making security and performance improvements.

We don’t think that customers should have to compromise and neither does Vectrix. The Vectrix product focuses on delivering immediate value in less than five minutes after the two or three clicks required to configure the first scan of a SaaS application. Customers can begin to flag risks in their organization in a matter of minutes without the need for a complex deployment.

1+1=3 in terms of value for our customers when used with our existing Zero Trust products

The Vectrix product will not be inserted as a point solution add-on. We’re making it a core part of our Zero Trust bundle because integrating features from products like our Secure Web Gateway give customers a comprehensive solution that works better together.

What’s next?

We’re excited to welcome Vectrix to the Cloudflare team. You can learn more about why they decided to join Cloudflare in this blog post published today.

We have already started migrating their services to the Cloudflare global network and plan to open sign-ups for a beta in the next couple of months. If you are interested, please sign up here. Don’t let the beta delay the start of your own journey with these products—we’ll be inviting users off of the waitlist based on when they first started deploying Cloudflare’s Zero Trust products.

Secure how your servers connect to the Internet today

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/secure-how-your-servers-connect-to-the-internet-today/

Secure how your servers connect to the Internet todaySecure how your servers connect to the Internet today

The vulnerability disclosed yesterday in the Java-based logging package, log4j, allows attackers to execute code on a remote server. We’ve updated Cloudflare’s WAF to defend your infrastructure against this 0-day attack. The attack also relies on exploiting servers that are allowed unfettered connectivity to the public Internet. To help solve that challenge, your team can deploy Cloudflare One today to filter and log how your infrastructure connects to any destination.

Securing traffic inbound and outbound

You can read about the vulnerability in more detail in our analysis published earlier today, but the attack starts when an attacker adds a specific string to input that the server logs. Today’s updates to Cloudflare’s WAF block that malicious string from being sent to your servers. We still strongly recommend that you patch your instances of log4j immediately to prevent lateral movement.

If the string has already been logged, the vulnerability compromises servers by tricking them into sending a request to a malicious LDAP server. The destination of the malicious server could be any arbitrary URL. Attackers who control that URL can then respond to the request with arbitrary code that the server can execute.

At the time of this blog, it does not appear any consistent patterns of malicious hostnames exist like those analyzed in the SUNBURST attack. However, any server or network with unrestricted connectivity to the public Internet is a risk for this specific vulnerability and others that rely on exploiting that open window.

First, filter and log DNS queries with two-clicks

From what we’re observing in early reports, the vulnerability mostly relies on connectivity to IP addresses. Cloudflare’s network firewall, the second step in this blog, focuses on that level of security. However, your team can adopt a defense-in-depth strategy by deploying Cloudflare’s protective DNS resolver today to apply DNS filtering to add security and visibility in minutes to any servers that need to communicate out to the Internet.

If you configure Cloudflare Gateway as the DNS resolver for those servers, any DNS query they make to find the IP address of a given host, malicious or not, will be sent to a nearby Cloudflare data center first. Cloudflare runs the world’s fastest DNS resolver so that you don’t have to compromise performance for this level of added safety and logging. When that query arrives, Cloudflare’s network can then:

  • filter your DNS queries to block the resolution of queries made to known malicious destinations, and
  • log every query if you need to investigate and audit after potential events.
Secure how your servers connect to the Internet today

Alternatively, if you know every host that your servers need to connect to, you can create a positive security model with Cloudflare Gateway. In this model, your resource can only send DNS queries to the domains that you provide. Queries to any other destinations, including new and arbitrary ones like those that could be part of this attack, will be blocked by default.

> Ready to get started today? You can begin filtering and logging all of the DNS queries made by your servers or your entire network with these instructions here.

Second, secure network traffic leaving your infrastructure

Protective DNS filtering can add security and visibility in minutes, but bad actors can target all of the other ways that your servers communicate out to the rest of the Internet. Historically, organizations deployed network firewalls in their data centers to filter the traffic entering and exiting their network. Their teams ran capacity planning exercises, purchased the appliances, and deployed hardware. Some of these appliances eventually moved to the cloud, but the pain of deployment stayed mostly the same.

Cloudflare One’s network firewall helps your team secure all of your network’s traffic through a single, cloud-native, solution that does not require that you need to manage any hardware or any virtual appliances. Deploying this level of security only requires that you decide how you want to send traffic to Cloudflare. You can connect your network through multiple on-ramp options, including network layer (GRE or IPsec tunnels), direct connections, and a device client.

Secure how your servers connect to the Internet today

Once connected, traffic leaving your network will first route through a Cloudflare data center. Cloudflare’s network will apply filters at layers 3 through 5 of the OSI model. Your administrators can then create policies based on IP, port, protocol in both stateless and stateful options. If you want to save even more time, Cloudflare uses the data we have about threats on the Internet to create managed lists for you that you can block with a single click.

Similar to DNS queries, if you know that your servers and services in your network only need to reach specific IPs or ports, you can build a positive security model with allow-list rules that restrict connections and traffic to just the destinations you specify. In either model, Cloudflare’s network will handle logging for you. Your team can export these logs to your SIEM for audit retention or additional analysis if you need to investigate a potential attack.

> Ready to get started securing your network? Follow the guide here and tell us you’d like to get started and we’ll be ready to help your team.

Third, inspect and filter HTTP traffic

Some attacks will rely on convincing your servers and endpoints to send HTTP requests to specific destinations, leaking data or grabbing malware to download in your infrastructure. To help solve that challenge, you can layer HTTP inspection, virus scanning, and logging in Cloudflare’s network.

If you completed Step Two above, you can use the same on-ramp that you configured to upgrade UPD and TCP traffic where Cloudflare’s Secure Web Gateway can apply HTTP filtering and logging to the requests leaving your network. If you need more granular control, you can deploy Cloudflare’s client software to build rules that only apply to specific endpoints in your infrastructure.

Like every other layer in this security model, you can also only allow your servers to connect to an approved list of destinations. Cloudflare’s Secure Web Gateway will allow and log those requests and block attempts to reach any other destinations.

Secure how your servers connect to the Internet today

> Ready to begin inspecting and filtering HTTP traffic? Follow the instructions here to get started today.

What’s next?

Deploying filtering and logging today will help protect against the next attack or attempts to continue to exploit today’s vulnerability, but we’re encouraging everyone to start by patching your deployments of log4j immediately.

As we write this, we’re updating existing managed rulesets to include reports of destinations used to attempt to exploit today’s vulnerability. We’ll continue to update those policies as we learn more information.

Helping Keep Governments Safe and Secure

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/helping-keep-governments-safe-and-secure/

Helping Keep Governments Safe and Secure

Helping Keep Governments Safe and Secure

Today, we are excited to share that Cloudflare and Accenture Federal Services (AFS) have been selected by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop a joint solution to help the federal government defend itself against cyberattacks. The solution consists of Cloudflare’s protective DNS resolver which will filter DNS queries from offices and locations of the federal government and stream events directly to Accenture’s analysis platform.

Located within DHS, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) operates as “the nation’s risk advisor.”1 CISA works with partners across the public and private sector to improve the security and reliability of critical infrastructure; a mission that spans across the federal government, State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial partnerships and the private sector to provide solutions to emerging and ever-changing threats.

Over the last few years, CISA has repeatedly flagged the cyber risk posed by malicious hostnames, phishing emails with malicious links, and untrustworthy upstream Domain Name System (DNS) resolvers.2 Attackers can compromise devices or accounts, and ultimately data, by tricking a user or system into sending a DNS query for a specific hostname. Once that query is resolved, those devices establish connections that can lead to malware downloads, phishing websites, or data exfiltration.

In May 2021, CISA and the National Security Agency (NSA) proposed that teams deploy protective DNS resolvers to prevent those attacks from becoming incidents. Unlike standard DNS resolvers, protective DNS resolvers check the hostname being resolved to determine if the destination is malicious. If that is the case, or even if the destination is just suspicious, the resolver can stop answering the DNS query and block the connection.

Earlier this year, CISA announced they are not only recommending a protective DNS resolver — they have launched a program to offer a solution to their partners. After a thorough review process, CISA has announced that they have selected Cloudflare and AFS to deliver a joint solution that can be used by departments and agencies of any size within the Federal Civilian Executive Branch.

Helping keep governments safer

Attacks against the critical infrastructure in the United States are continuing to increase. Cloudflare Radar, where we publish insights from our global network, consistently sees the U.S. as one of the most targeted countries for DDoS attacks. Attacks like phishing campaigns compromise credentials to sensitive systems. Ransomware bypasses traditional network perimeters and shuts down target systems.

The sophistication of those attacks also continues to increase. Last year’s SolarWinds Orion compromise represents a new type of supply chain attack where trusted software becomes the backdoor for data breaches. Cloudflare’s analysis of the SolarWinds incident observed compromise patterns that were active over eight months, during which the destinations used grew to nearly 5,000 unique subdomains.

The increase in volume and sophistication has driven a demand for the information and tools to defend against these types of threats at all levels of the US government. Last year, CISA advised over 6,000 state and local officials, as well as federal partners, on mechanisms to protect their critical infrastructure.

At Cloudflare, we have observed a similar pattern. In 2017, Cloudflare launched the Athenian Project to provide state, county, or municipal governments with security for websites that administer elections or report results. In 2020, 229 state and local governments, in 28 states, trusted Cloudflare to help defend their election websites. State and local government websites served by Cloudflare’s Athenian Project increased by 48% last year.

As these attacks continue to evolve, one thing many have in common is their use of a DNS query to a malicious hostname. From SolarWinds to last month’s spearphishing attack against the U.S. Agency for International Development, attackers continue to rely on one of the most basic technologies used when connecting to the Internet.

Delivering a protective DNS resolver

User activity on the Internet typically starts with a DNS query to a DNS resolver. When users visit a website in their browser, open a link in an email, or use a mobile application, their device first sends a DNS query to convert the domain name of the website or server into the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the host serving that site. Once their device has the IP address, they can establish a connection.

Helping Keep Governments Safe and Secure
Figure 1. Complete DNS lookup and web page query

Attacks on the Internet can also start the same way. Devices that download malware begin making DNS queries to establish connections and leak information. Users that visit an imposter website input their credentials and become part of a phishing attack.

These attacks are successful because DNS resolvers, by default, trust all destinations. If a user sends a DNS query for any hostname, the resolver returns the IP address without determining if that destination is suspicious.

Some hostnames are known to security researchers, including hostnames used in previous attacks or ones that use typos of popular hostnames. Other attacks start from unknown or new threats. Detecting those requires monitoring DNS query behavior, detecting patterns to new hostnames, or blocking newly seen and registered domains altogether.

Protective DNS resolvers apply a Zero Trust model to DNS queries. Instead of trusting any destination, protective resolvers check the hostname of every query and IP address of every response against a list of known malicious destinations. If the hostname or IP address is in that list, the resolver will not return the result to the user and the connection will fail.

Building a solution with Accenture Federal Services

The solution being delivered to CISA, Cloudflare Gateway, builds on Cloudflare’s network to deliver a protective DNS resolver that does not compromise performance. It starts by sending all DNS queries from enrolled devices and offices to Cloudflare’s network. While more of the HTTP Internet continues to be encrypted, the default protocol for sending DNS queries on most devices is still unencrypted. Cloudflare Gateway’s protective DNS resolver supports encrypted options like DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT).

Next, blocking DNS queries to malicious hostnames starts with knowing what hostnames are potentially malicious. Cloudflare’s network provides our protective DNS resolver with unique visibility into threats on the Internet. Every day, Cloudflare’s network handles over 800 billion DNS queries. Our infrastructure responds to 25 million HTTP requests per second. We deploy that network in more than 200 cities in over 100 countries around the world, giving our team the ability to see attack patterns around the world.

We convert that data into the insights that power our security products. For example, we analyze the billions of DNS queries we handle to detect anomalous behavior that would indicate a hostname is being used to leak data through a DNS tunneling attack. For the CISA solution, Cloudflare’s datasets are further enriched by applying additional cybersecurity research along with Accenture’s Cyber Threat Intelligence (ACTI) feed to provide signals to detect new and changing threats on the internet. This dataset is further analyzed by data scientists using advanced business intelligence tools powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Working towards a FedRAMP future

Our Public Sector team is focused on partnering with Federal, State and Local Governments to provide a safe and secure digital experience. We are excited to help CISA deliver an innovative, modern, and cost-efficient solution to the entire civilian federal government.

We will continue this path following our recent announcement that we are currently “In Process” in the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Marketplace. The government’s rigorous security assessment will allow other federal agencies to adopt Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Security solutions in the future.

What’s next?

We are looking forward to working with Accenture Federal Services to deliver this protective DNS resolver solution to CISA. This contract award demonstrates CISA’s belief in the importance of having protective DNS capabilities as part of a layered defense. We applaud CISA for taking this step and allowing us to partner with the US Government to deliver this solution.

Like CISA, we believe that teams large and small should have the tools they need to protect their critical systems. Your team can also get started using Cloudflare to secure your organization today. Cloudflare Gateway, part of Cloudflare for Teams, is available to organizations of any size.

—

1https://www.cisa.gov/about-cisa
2See, for example, https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Addressing_DNS_Resolution_on_Federal_Networks_Memo.pdf; https://media.defense.gov/2021/Mar/03/2002593055/-1/-1/0/CSI_Selecting-Protective-DNS_UOO11765221.PDF

One more (Zero Trust) thing: Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/one-more-zero-trust-thing-cloudflare-intrusion-detection/

One more (Zero Trust) thing: Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System

One more (Zero Trust) thing: Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System

Today, we’re very excited to announce our plans for Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System, a new product that monitors your network and alerts when an attack is suspected. With deep integration into Cloudflare One, Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System gives you a bird’s eye view of your entire global network and inspects all traffic for bad behavior, regardless of whether it came from outside or inside your network.

Analyze your network without doing the legwork

Enterprises build firewall rules to keep their networks safe from external and internal threats. When bad actors try to attack a network, those firewalls check if the attack matches a rule pattern. If it does, the firewall steps in and blocks the attack.

Teams used to configure those rules across physical firewall appliances, frequently of different makes and models, deployed to physical locations. Yesterday, we announced Magic Firewall, Cloudflare’s network-level firewall delivered in our data centers around the world. Your team can write a firewall rule once, deploy it to Cloudflare, and our global network will protect your offices and data centers without the need for on-premises hardware.

This is great if you know where attacks are coming from. If you don’t have that level of certainty, finding those types of attacks becomes expensive guesswork. Sophisticated attackers can prod a network’s defenses to determine what rules do or do not exist. They can exploit that information to launch quieter attacks. Or even worse: compromise your employees and attack from the inside.

We’re excited to end Zero Trust week by announcing one more thing: Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System (IDS), a solution that analyzes your entire network simultaneously and alerts you to events that your rules might not catch.

Cloudflare IDS represents a critical piece of Cloudflare One. With WARP connecting your devices, and Magic Transit connecting your offices and data centers to Cloudflare, Cloudflare IDS sits on top of both, allowing you to examine and evaluate all traffic simultaneously.  This gives you a single view of what’s happening inside of your network and where breaches might have occurred. Cloudflare IDS is also constantly getting better at identifying threats and attacks. You can opt in to receive alerts, and with a single-click, quickly and easily block intrusion attempts that sneak past static rules. Most importantly, your team benefits from the intelligence Cloudflare gathers from attacks in other regions or industries to flag events that impact you.

One more (Zero Trust) thing: Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System

So how does it work?

Assume breach

Legacy security models implicitly trusted any connection inside the network. That made them vulnerable to breaches and attacks from bad actors coming from within. The concept of Zero Trust flips the model by assuming every connection is hazardous. Instead of waiting for evidence that a definite breach has occured, the assumption is that one has already happened.

In order to implement the Zero Trust model effectively, you need two core components:

  • A comprehensive view across your entire network, which is constantly analyzed to catch problems that static rules might have missed, and;
  • An intrusion detection system (purchased or homegrown), which is doing the analyzing.

Part of what drives Cloudflare IDS’s effectiveness is its deep integration with Cloudflare One. WARP and Magic Transit provide the first component, allowing you to connect your entire network and all devices to Cloudflare, giving you a bird’s eye view of every single packet and connection.

Cloudflare IDS then helps detect attacks coming from everywhere inside the network by actively looking at traffic and the contents of traffic. Cloudflare IDS will operate in two ways: traffic shape and traffic inspection. By looking at the behavior of traffic on your network, we can learn what normal behavior looks like: a user only logs into a single system each day, they only access certain applications etc. We would not expect someone to try to log into many systems at once or port scan the network: clear signs of bad intent.  

The other form of intrusion detection we employ is traffic inspection: looking inside traffic that flows through your network to see if anyone is performing a very targeted attack. These styles of attacks can’t be detected using traditional methods because they actually look like normal traffic: only by looking inside can we see that the actor is trying something malicious.

Herd immunity

Attackers tend to follow a pattern. Bad actors who try an attack on one enterprise will then repeat that same attack elsewhere. We’ve unfortunately seen this increase, lately, as attacks like Fancy Bear’s DDoS campaign move from organization to organization and repeat the same playbook.

We think we’re safer together. Cloudflare IDS learns from attacks against our network and all our customer’s networks, to constantly identify new types of attacks being launched. We can then give your team the benefit of lessons learned by keeping Cloudflare and other customers safe. The platform also incorporates external threat feeds; and finally, allows you to bring your own.

Offload CPU spend

A constant source of complaint from customers who are running their own IDS solution (whether built in-house or purchased) is that IDS solutions are notoriously CPU-hungry. They need to keep a lot of state in memory, and require a lot of computation to work effectively and accurately.

With Cloudflare IDS, you can offload that burden to our network. Cloudflare was built from the ground up to be infinitely scalable. Every edge data center runs the exact same software, allowing us to field out workload efficiently and at massive scale. With Cloudflare running your IDS, you can remove the computational resource burden of legacy solutions and stop worrying about capacity.

Ridiculously easy

When your team deploys Cloudflare IDS, you’ll need to click one button and that’s it. We’ll begin analyzing patterns in your Magic Transit traffic and Magic Firewall events to check them against our threat feeds.

If we determine that something suspicious has happened, we’ll send an alert to notify your team. Your security team can then begin to review the attempt and drill down into the data to make a determination about what happened. You can gain more insights into the type of attack and where it occurred on the dashboard. Remediation is a click away: just set up a rule and push it out to the global Cloudflare network: we’ll stop the attack dead in its tracks.

What’s next?

The launch of Cloudflare IDS will follow the GA of our Magic Firewall announcement. If you want to be the first to adopt IDS, please reach out to your account team to learn more.

Argo Tunnels that live forever

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/argo-tunnels-that-live-forever/

Argo Tunnels that live forever

Cloudflare secures your origin servers by proxying requests to your DNS records through our anycast network and to the external IP of your origin. However, external IP addresses can provide attackers with a path around Cloudflare security if they discover those destinations.

Argo Tunnels that live forever

We launched Argo Tunnel as a secure way to connect your origin to Cloudflare without a publicly routable IP address. With Tunnel, you don’t send traffic to an external IP. Instead, a lightweight daemon runs in your infrastructure and creates outbound-only connections to Cloudflare’s edge. With Argo Tunnel, you can quickly deploy infrastructure in a Zero Trust model by ensuring all requests to your resources pass through Cloudflare’s security filters.

Argo Tunnels that live forever

Originally, your Argo Tunnel connection corresponded to a DNS record in your account. Requests to that hostname hit Cloudflare’s network first and our edge sends those requests over the Argo Tunnel to your origin. Since these connections are outbound-only, you no longer need to poke holes in your infrastructure’s firewall. Your origins can serve traffic through Cloudflare without being vulnerable to attacks that bypass Cloudflare.

However, fitting an outbound-only connection into a reverse proxy creates some ergonomic and stability hurdles. The original Argo Tunnel architecture attempted to both manage DNS records and create connections. When connections became disrupted, Argo Tunnel would recreate the entire deployment. Additionally, Argo Tunnel connections could not be treated like regular origin servers in Cloudflare’s control plane and had to be managed directly from the server-side software.

Today, we’re introducing a new architecture that treats Argo Tunnel connections like a true origin server without the risk of exposure to the rest of the Internet. Now, when you create a Tunnel connection, you can point DNS records for any hostname in your account, or load balancer pools, to that connection from the Cloudflare dashboard. You can also run Argo Tunnel connections without the need for leaving certificates and service tokens on your servers.

Keeping persistent objects persistent

Argo Tunnel has objects that tend to stay persistent (DNS records) and objects that deliberately change and recreate (connections from `cloudflared` to Cloudflare). Argo Tunnel previously conflated the two categories, which led to some issues.

The edge vs. the control plane

Cloudflare as a whole consists of two components: the edge network and the control plane that manages the configuration of that network.

The data centers in 200 cities around the world that proxy traffic to your origin make up the edge network. These data centers are highly available and, thanks to Anycast IP routing, can gracefully handle traffic if one or more data centers go offline.

When you make a change to something in Cloudflare (whether via the UI in Cloudflare’s dashboard, or the API) our control plane receives it, authenticates it, and then pushes it to our edge.

If the control plane goes down, the edge should not be degraded – traffic will continue to be served using the most recent configuration. At launch, Argo Tunnel muddled the two in some places, which meant that control plane issues could become edge issues for Tunnel users.

Starting every Tunnel from scratch

Regardless of whether a Tunnel is connecting for the first time or the 100th, the operation repeated a series of high-level steps in the original architecture:

  1. cloudflared connects to an Argo Tunnel service running in Cloudflare’s control plane. That service registers your Tunnel and its connections.
  2. cloudflared creates a public DNS record for your hostname which points to a randomly generated CNAME record for load balanced Tunnels or an IPv6 for traditional Tunnels. The ephemeral CNAME record represents your Tunnel.
  3. The control plane then tells Cloudflare’s edge about these DNS entries and where the CNAME or IP address should send traffic. Traffic can now be routed to cloudflared.
  4. If the Tunnel disconnects, for any reason, the Argo Tunnel service unregistered the Tunnel and deleted the DNS record.

The last step is an issue. In most cases, you create an Argo Tunnel for a service meant to run indefinitely. The DNS record should stay persistent – it’s an app that you manage that should not change. However, a simple restart or disconnection meant that cloudflared had to follow every step and start itself from scratch. If any of those upstream services were degraded, the Tunnel would fail to reconnect.

This model also introduces other shortcomings. You cannot gracefully change the DNS record of a Tunnel; instead, you had to stop cloudflared and rerun the service. Visibility was limited. Load balancing introduced complications with how origins were counted.

Phase 1: Improving stability

The team started by reducing the impact of those dependencies. Over the last year, Argo Tunnel has quietly replaced single points of failure with distributed systems that are more fault tolerant.

Tunnels now live longer. Argo Tunnel has migrated to Cloudflare’s Unimog platform, which has increased the average life of a connection from minutes to days. When connections live longer, they restart less, and are then subject to fewer upstream hiccups.

Additionally, some Tunnels no longer need to follow the entire creation flow. If your Tunnel reconnects, we opportunistically try to reestablish it with the records already at our edge.

These changes have dramatically improved the stability of Argo Tunnel as a platform, but still left a couple of core problems: Tunnel reconnections were treated like new connections and managing those connections added friction.

Phase 2: Named Tunnels that outlive connections

Starting today, Argo Tunnel’s architecture distinguishes between the persistent objects (DNS records, cloudflared) from the ephemeral objects (the connections). To do that, this release introduces the concept of a permanent name that you assign to a Tunnel.

In the old model, cloudflaredcreated both the DNS record entries and established the connections from the server to Cloudflare’s network. DNS records became tied to those connections and could not be changed. Even worse, each time cloudflared restarted, we treated it like a new Tunnel and had to propagate this information into DNS and Load Balancer systems. If those had delays, the restart could become an outage.

Argo Tunnels that live forever

Today’s release separates DNS creation from connection creation to make tunnels more stable and more simple to manage. In this model, you can use `cloudflared` to create an Argo Tunnel that has a persistent, stable name, that can be entirely unrelated to the hostname.

Once created, you can point DNS records in your account to a stable subdomain that relies on a UUID tied to that persistent name. Since the name and UUID do not change, your DNS record never needs to be cleaned up or recreated when Argo Tunnel restarts. In the event of a restart, the enrolled instance of cloudflared connects back to that UUID address.

Argo Tunnels that live forever

You can also treat named Argo Tunnels like origin servers in this architecture – except these origins can only be connected to via a DNS record in your account. You can delete a DNS record and create a new one that points to the UUID address and traffic will be served – all without touching cloudflared.

How it works

You can begin using this new architecture today with the following steps. First, you’ll need to upgrade to the latest version of cloudflared.

1. Login to Cloudflare from `cloudflared`

Run cloudflared tunnel login and authenticate to your Cloudflare account. This step will generate a cert.pem file. That certificate contains a token that gives your instance of cloudflared the ability to create Named Tunnels in your account, as well as the ability to eventually point DNS records to them.

Argo Tunnels that live forever

2. Create your Tunnel

You can now create a Tunnel that has a persistent name. Run cloudflared tunnel create <name> to do so. The name does not have to be a hostname. For example, you can assign a name that represents the application, the particular server, or the cloud environment where it runs.

cloudflared will create a Tunnel with the name that you give it and a UUID. This name will be associated with your account. Only DNS records in your account will proxy traffic to the connection. Additionally, the name will not be removed unless you actively delete it. The connections can stop and restart and will use the same name and UUID.

Argo Tunnels that live forever

Creating a named Tunnel also generates a credentials file that is distinct from the cert.pem issued during the login. You only need the credentials file to run the Tunnel. If you do not want to create additional named Tunnels or DNS records from cloudflared, you can delete the cert.pem file to avoid leaving API tokens and certificates in your environment.

3. Configure Tunnel details

Configure your instance of cloudflared, including the URL that cloudflared will proxy traffic to in the configuration file. Alternatively, you can run the Tunnel in an ad hoc mode from the command line using the steps below.

4. Run your Tunnel

You can begin running the Tunnel with the command, cloudflared tunnel run <name> or cloudflared tunnel run <UUID> and it will start proxying traffic. If you are running the Tunnel without the cert.pem file and only the credentials file, you must use cloudflared tunnel run <UUID>.

Argo Tunnels that live forever

5. Send traffic to your Tunnel

You can now decide how to send traffic to this persistent Tunnel. If you want to create a long-lived DNS record in the Cloudflare dashboard, you can point it to the Tunnel UUID subdomain in the format UUID.cfargotunnel.com. You can do the same in the Cloudflare Load Balancer panel to add this object to a load balanced pool where it will be treated as just one additional origin.

Argo Tunnels that live forever

Alternatively, you can continue to create DNS records from cloudflared. Run the following command, cloudflared tunnel route dns <name> <hostname> or cloudflared tunnel route dns <UUID> <hostname> to associate the DNS record with the Tunnel address. You will only be able to create a DNS record from cloudflared for the zone name you selected when authenticating. Unlike the previous architecture, this DNS record will not be deleted if the Tunnel disconnects.

When this instance of cloudflared restarts, the name, UUID, and DNS record will not need to be recreated. The connection will reestablish and begin serving traffic.

[Optional] Check what Tunnels exist

You can also use this architecture to see your active Tunnels. Run cloudflared tunnel list to view the Tunnels created and their connection status. You can delete Tunnels, as well, by running cloudflared tunnel delete <name> or cloudflare tunnel delete <UUID>. To delete Tunnels, you do need the cert.pem file.

Argo Tunnels that live forever

Credential and cert management

Once you have created a named Tunnel, you no longer need the cert.pem file to run that Tunnel and connect it to Cloudflare’s network. If you’re running the tunnel on a remote server or in a container, you can copy the credential file without sharing cert.pem outside your computer.

Similarly, if you want to let another person on your team run the Tunnel, you can send them the credentials file without sharing the cert.pem file as well. The cert.pem file is still required to create additional Tunnels, list existing tunnels, manage DNS records, or delete Tunnels.

The credentials file contains a secret scoped to the specific Tunnel UUID which establishes a connection from cloudflared to Cloudflare’s network. cloudflared operates like a client and establishes a TLS connection from your infrastructure to Cloudflare’s edge.

What’s next?

The new Argo Tunnel architecture is available today. You’ll need cloudflared version 2020.9.3 or later to begin using these features. The latest version of cloudflared is backwards compatible with the legacy model of Argo Tunnel. Additional documentation is available here.

Cloudflare Access: now for SaaS apps, too

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-access-for-saas/

Cloudflare Access: now for SaaS apps, too

Cloudflare Access: now for SaaS apps, too

We built Cloudflare Access™ as a tool to solve a problem we had inside of Cloudflare. We rely on a set of applications to manage and monitor our network. Some of these are popular products that we self-host, like the Atlassian suite, and others are tools we built ourselves. We deployed those applications on a private network. To reach them, you had to either connect through a secure WiFi network in a Cloudflare office, or use a VPN.

That VPN added friction to how we work. We had to dedicate part of Cloudflare’s onboarding just to teaching users how to connect. If someone received a PagerDuty alert, they had to rush to their laptop and sit and wait while the VPN connected. Team members struggled to work while mobile. New offices had to backhaul their traffic. In 2017 and early 2018, our IT team triaged hundreds of help desk tickets with titles like these:

Cloudflare Access: now for SaaS apps, too

While our IT team wrestled with usability issues, our Security team decided that poking holes in our private network was too much of a risk to maintain. Once on the VPN, users almost always had too much access. We had limited visibility into what happened on the private network. We tried to segment the network, but that was error-prone.

Around that time, Google published its BeyondCorp paper that outlined a model of what has become known as Zero Trust Security. Instead of trusting any user on a private network, a Zero Trust perimeter evaluates every request and connection for user identity and other variables.

We decided to create our own implementation by building on top of Cloudflare. Despite BeyondCorp being a new concept, we had experience in this field. For nearly a decade, Cloudflare’s global network had been operating like a Zero Trust perimeter for applications on the Internet – we just didn’t call it that. For example, products like our WAF evaluated requests to public-facing applications. We could add identity as a new layer and use the same network to protect applications teams used internally.

We began moving our self-hosted applications to this new project. Users logged in with our SSO provider from any network or location, and the experience felt like any other SaaS app. Our Security team gained the control and visibility they needed, and our IT team became more productive. Specifically, our IT teams have seen ~80% reduction in the time they spent servicing VPN-related tickets, which unlocked over $100K worth of help desk efficiency annually. Later in 2018, we launched this as a product that our customers could use as well.

By shifting security to Cloudflare’s network, we could also make the perimeter smarter. We could require that users login with a hard key, something that our identity provider couldn’t support. We could restrict connections to applications from specific countries. We added device posture integrations. Cloudflare Access became an aggregator of identity signals in this Zero Trust model.

As a result, our internal tools suddenly became more secure than the SaaS apps we used. We could only add rules to the applications we could place on Cloudflare’s reverse proxy. When users connected to popular SaaS tools, they did not pass through Cloudflare’s network. We lacked a consistent level of visibility and security across all of our applications. So did our customers.

Starting today, our team and yours can fix that. We’re excited to announce that you can now bring the Zero Trust security features of Cloudflare Access to your SaaS applications. You can protect any SaaS application that can integrate with a SAML identity provider with Cloudflare Access.

Even though that SaaS application is not deployed on Cloudflare, we can still add security rules to every login. You can begin using this feature today and, in the next couple of months, you’ll be able to ensure that all traffic to these SaaS applications connects through Cloudflare Gateway.

Standardizing and aggregating identity in Cloudflare’s network

Support for SaaS applications in Cloudflare Access starts with standardizing identity. Cloudflare Access  aggregates different sources of identity: username, password, location, and device. Administrators build rules to determine what requirements a user must meet to reach an application. When users attempt to connect, Cloudflare enforces every rule in that checklist before the user ever reaches the app.

The primary rule in that checklist is user identity. Cloudflare Access is not an identity provider; instead, we source identity from SSO services like Okta, Ping Identity, OneLogin, or public apps like GitHub. When a user attempts to access a resource, we prompt them to login with the provider configured. If successful, the provider shares the user’s identity and other metadata with Cloudflare Access.

A username is just one part of a Zero Trust decision. We consider additional rules, like country restrictions or device posture via partners like Tanium or, soon, additional partners CrowdStrike and VMware Carbon Black. If the user meets all of those criteria, Cloudflare Access summarizes those variables into a standard proof of identity that our network trusts: a JSON Web Token (JWT).

Cloudflare Access: now for SaaS apps, too

A JWT is a secure, information-dense way to share information. Most importantly, JWTs follow a standard, so that different systems can trust one another. When users login to Cloudflare Access, we generate and sign a JWT that contains the decision and information about the user. We store that information in the user’s browser and treat that as proof of identity for the duration of their session.

Every JWT must consist of three Base64-URL strings: the header, the payload, and the signature.

  • The header defines the cryptographic operation that encrypts the data in the JWT.
  • The payload consists of name-value pairs for at least one and typically multiple claims, encoded in JSON. For example, the payload can contain the identity of a user.
  • The signature allows the receiving party to confirm that the payload is authentic.

We store the identity data inside of the payload and include the following details:

  • User identity: typically the email address of the user retrieved from your identity provider.
  • Authentication domain: the domain that signs the token. For Access, we use “example.cloudflareaccess.com” where “example” is a subdomain you can configure.
  • amr: If available, the multifactor authentication method the login used, like a hard key or a TOTP code.
  • Country: The country where the user is connecting from.
  • Audience: The domain of the application you are attempting to reach.
  • Expiration: the time at which the token is no longer valid for use.

Some applications support JWTs natively for SSO. We can send the token to the application and the user can login. In other cases, we’ve released plugins for popular providers like Atlassian and Sentry. However, most applications lack JWT support and rely on a different standard: SAML.

Converting JWT to SAML with Cloudflare Workers

You can deploy Cloudflare’s reverse proxy to protect the applications you host, which puts Cloudflare Access in a position to add identity checks when those requests hit our edge. However, the SaaS applications you use are hosted and managed by the vendors themselves as part of the value they offer. In the same way that I cannot decide who can walk into the front door of the bakery downstairs, you can’t build rules about what requests should and shouldn’t be allowed.

When those applications support integration with your SSO provider, you do have control over the login flow. Many applications rely on a popular standard, SAML, to securely exchange identity data and user attributes between two systems. The SaaS application does not need to know the details of the identity provider’s rules.

Cloudflare Access uses that relationship to force SaaS logins through Cloudflare’s network. The application itself thinks of Cloudflare Access as the SAML identity provider. When users attempt to login, the application sends the user to login with Cloudflare Access.

That said, Cloudflare Access is not an identity provider – it’s an identity aggregator. When the user reaches Access, we will redirect them to the identity provider in the same way that we do today when users request a site that uses Cloudflare’s reverse proxy. By adding that hop through Access, though, we can layer the additional contextual rules and log the event.

Cloudflare Access: now for SaaS apps, too

We still generate a JWT for every login providing a standard proof of identity. Integrating with SaaS applications required us to convert that JWT into a SAML assertion that we can send to the SaaS application. Cloudflare Access runs in every one of Cloudflare’s data centers around the world to improve availability and avoid slowing down users. We did not want to lose those advantages for this flow. To solve that, we turned to Cloudflare Workers.

The core login flow of Cloudflare Access already runs on Cloudflare Workers. We built support for SaaS applications by using Workers to take the JWT and convert its content into SAML assertions that are sent to the SaaS application. The application thinks that Cloudflare Access is the identity provider, even though we’re just aggregating identity signals from your SSO provider and other sources into the JWT, and sending that summary to the app via SAML.

Integrate with Gateway for comprehensive logging (coming soon)

Cloudflare Gateway keeps your users and data safe from threats on the Internet by filtering Internet-bound connections that leave laptops and offices. Gateway gives administrators the ability to block, allow, or log every connection and request to SaaS applications.

However, users are connecting from personal devices and home WiFi networks, potentially bypassing Internet security filtering available on corporate networks. If users have their password and MFA token, they can bypass security requirements and reach into SaaS applications from their own, unprotected devices at home.

To ensure traffic to your SaaS apps only connects over Gateway-protected devices, Cloudflare Access will add a new rule type that requires Gateway when users login to your SaaS applications. Once enabled, users will only be able to connect to your SaaS applications when they use Cloudflare Gateway. Gateway will log those connections and provide visibility into every action within SaaS apps and the Internet.

Every identity provider is now capable of SAML SSO

Identity providers come in two flavors and you probably use both every day. One type is purpose-built to be an identity provider, and the other accidentally became one. With this release, Cloudflare Access can convert either into a SAML-compliant SSO option.

Corporate identity providers, like Okta or Azure AD, manage your business identity. Your IT department creates and maintains the account. They can integrate it with SaaS Applications for SSO.

The second type of login option consists of SaaS providers that began as consumer applications and evolved into public identity providers. LinkedIn, GitHub, and Google required users to create accounts in their applications for networking, coding, or email.

Over the last decade, other applications began to trust those public identity provider logins. You could use your Google account to log into a news reader and your GitHub account to authenticate to DigitalOcean. Services like Google and Facebook became SSO options for everyone. However, most corporate applications only supported integration with a single SAML provider, something public identity providers do not provide. To rely on SSO as a team, you still needed a corporate identity provider.

Cloudflare Access converts a user login from any identity provider into a JWT. With this release, we also generate a standard SAML assertion. Your team can now use the SAML SSO features of a corporate identity provider with public providers like LinkedIn or GitHub.

Multi-SSO meets SaaS applications

We describe Cloudflare Access as a Multi-SSO service because you can integrate multiple identity providers, and their SSO flows, into Cloudflare’s Zero Trust network. That same capability now extends to integrating multiple identity providers with a single SaaS application.

Most SaaS applications will only integrate with a single identity provider, limiting your team to a single option. We know that our customers work with partners, contractors, or acquisitions which can make it difficult to standardize around a single identity option for SaaS logins.

Cloudflare Access can connect to multiple identity providers simultaneously, including multiple instances of the same provider. When users are prompted to login, they can choose the option that their particular team uses.

Cloudflare Access: now for SaaS apps, too

We’ve taken that ability and extended it into the Access for SaaS feature. Access generates a consistent identity from any provider, which we can now extend for SSO purposes to a SaaS application. Even if the application only supports a single identity provider, you can still integrate Cloudflare Access and merge identities across multiple sources. Now, team members who use your Okta instance and contractors who use LinkedIn can both SSO into your Atlassian suite.

All of your apps in one place

Cloudflare Access released the Access App Launch as a single destination for all of your internal applications. Your team members visit a URL that is unique to your organization and the App Launch displays all of the applications they can reach. The feature requires no additional administrative configuration; Cloudflare Access reads the user’s JWT and returns only the applications they are allowed to reach.

Cloudflare Access: now for SaaS apps, too

That experience now extends to all applications in your organization. When you integrate SaaS applications with Cloudflare Access, your users will be able to discover them in the App Launch. Like the flow for internal applications, this requires no additional configuration.

How to get started

To get started, you’ll need a Cloudflare Access account and a SaaS application that supports SAML SSO. Navigate to the Cloudflare for Teams dashboard and choose the “SaaS” application option to start integrating your applications. Cloudflare Access will walk through the steps to configure the application to trust Cloudflare Access as the SSO option.

Cloudflare Access: now for SaaS apps, too

Do you have an application that needs additional configuration? Please let us know.

Protect SaaS applications with Cloudflare for Teams today

Cloudflare Access for SaaS is available to all Cloudflare for Teams customers, including organizations on the free plan. Sign up for a Cloudflare for Teams account and follow the steps in the documentation to get started.

We will begin expanding the Gateway beta program to integrate Gateway’s logging and web filtering with the Access for SaaS feature before the end of the year.

Two clicks to add region-based Zero Trust compliance

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/two-clicks-to-enable-regional-zero-trust-compliance/

Two clicks to add region-based Zero Trust compliance

Your team members are probably not just working from home – they may be working from different regions or countries. The flexibility of remote work gives employees a chance to work from the towns where they grew up or countries they always wanted to visit. However, that distribution also presents compliance challenges.

Depending on your industry, keeping data inside of certain regions can be a compliance or regulatory requirement. You might require employees to connect from certain countries or exclude entire countries altogether from your corporate systems.

When we worked in physical offices, keeping data inside of a country was easy. All of your users connecting to an application from that office were, of course, in that country. Remote work changed that and teams had to scramble to find a way to keep people productive from anywhere, which often led to sacrifices in terms of compliance. Starting today, you can make geography-based compliance easy again in Cloudflare Access with just two clicks.

You can now build rules that require employees to connect from certain countries. You can also add rules that block team members from connecting from other countries. This feature works with any identity provider configured and requires no other changes for your users or administrators.

What is Cloudflare Access?

Cloudflare Access secures applications by applying Zero Trust enforcement to every request. Rather than trusting anyone on a private network, Access checks for identity any time someone attempts to reach an application. With Cloudflare’s global network, that check takes place in a data center in over 200 cities around the world to avoid compromising performance.

Behind the scenes, administrators build rules to decide who should be able to reach the tools protected by Access. In turn, when users need to connect to those tools, they are prompted to authenticate with one of the identity provider options. Cloudflare Access checks their login against the list of allowed users and, if permitted, allows the request to proceed.

Two clicks to add region-based Zero Trust compliance

Cloudflare Access can check more than just their username. As a Zero Trust platform, Access aggregates multiple sources of signal about a user and surfaces those to the administrator. Some signals include if the user authenticated with a mutual TLS client certificate or hard key. However, some organizations also have compliance requirements that center around region, in addition to multifactor authentication.

Allow some countries, exclude others

You can build Cloudflare Access rules to be as simple as only allow team members with @team.com email addresses. However, usernames and passwords alone are not always sufficient. Depending on where you operate, or where you need to operate, you can use Cloudflare Access to layer country-specific rules on top of your identity provider workflows.

With this release, you can now add rules that require users to connect from certain countries or restrict logins from other countries. For example, you can require that users only connect from Portugal.

Two clicks to add region-based Zero Trust compliance

You can also exclude countries altogether. Cloudflare does not have an office in Costa Rica, a place I know many of us would love to visit. If a member of the team was on a beach vacation there and I wanted to make sure they really unplugged from work, we could add a rule to block logins to our applications from Costa Rica.

Two clicks to add region-based Zero Trust compliance

Some applications might not need country-specific requirements. Cloudflare Access rules can be configured on an application-by-application basis. You can add rules about country connections to specific applications that contain sensitive information, while limiting others to just identity.

Audit logins by country and user

Cloudflare Access captures every request a user makes to an internal application, without the need for any code changes. Your organization can export these logs to a third-party storage or SIEM solution to audit the country of origin for each user request. With that data, your compliance and security teams can quickly audit where your corporate devices are operating without the need to deploy additional client-side software.

Layer with other Zero Trust rules

Zero trust security starts with a username. Administrators build rules to determine which users can reach specific applications. Cloudflare Access integrates with your team’s identity provider, or even multiple identity providers, to make those username-based decisions at the edge of our network.

However, identity consists of more than just a username. Cloudflare Access can aggregate multiple sources of signal in Cloudflare’s network. Access can use that information to make a decision about identity in our network – long before that request ever reaches your infrastructure.

You can combine user rules with mutual TLS requirements, or device posture checks, and even force logins to always use a hard key. All of these zero-trust rules run inline with Cloudflare’s existing security features, like our WAF and DDoS mitigation, to add layers of security to every request. The Cloudflare network gives your team a zero-trust platform to apply all of the data we can gather about a request to determine whether or not it should be allowed.

The country rules we’re announcing today become another layer in that zero trust model. Like other sources of signal, you can combine these rules to build a comprehensive policy tailored to your organization’s compliance or security needs. For example, you can build a rule that only allows users to login to your application when they connect from Germany and use a physical hard key.

Two clicks to add region-based Zero Trust compliance

How to get started

To get started, navigate to an application you have added to Cloudflare Access or create a new one. Cloudflare Access policies consist of actions that can allow, block, or bypass requests based on the criteria defined. Access follows policies in order of precedence from top to bottom in the UI.

Inside of a policy you can define the criteria with three types of operators:

  • Include: Include rules function like OR operators. Users must meet at least one criterion in an Include rule. For example, an include rule can be constructed to allow anyone with @cloudflare.com email domains or [email protected] email domains to connect.
  • Require: Require rules function like AND operators. Users must meet all Require rule criteria.
  • Exclude: Exclusion rules function like “NOT” operators. Users must not meet the criterion of an Exclude rule.

To require that users connect from a particular country, create an Allow policy that includes your users email or identity provider group. Within that Allow policy, add a Require rule and choose the country that will be required. If you want to create a rule that requires multiple countries, you can add them into an Access Group.

Two clicks to add region-based Zero Trust compliance

You can then add that group into the Require rule.

Two clicks to add region-based Zero Trust compliance

What’s next?

Cloudflare Access, part of Cloudflare for Teams, is available today. The country requirement rule is available in all plans.You can follow the documentation here to add the additional rule.