Tag Archives: Cloudflare for Teams

Introducing Zero Trust Private Networking

Post Syndicated from Kenny Johnson original https://blog.cloudflare.com/private-networking/

Introducing Zero Trust Private Networking

Starting today, you can build identity-aware, Zero Trust network policies using Cloudflare for Teams. You can apply these rules to connections bound for the public Internet or for traffic inside a private network running on Cloudflare. These rules are enforced in Cloudflare’s network of data centers in over 200 cities around the world, giving your team comprehensive network filtering and logging, wherever your users work, without slowing them down.

Last week, my teammate Pete’s blog post described the release of network-based policies in Cloudflare for Teams. Your team can now keep users safe from threats by limiting the ports and IPs that devices in your fleet can reach. With that release, security teams can now replace even more security appliances with Cloudflare’s network.

We’re excited to help your team replace that hardware, but we also know that those legacy network firewalls were used to keep private data and applications safe in a castle-and-moat model. You can now use Cloudflare for Teams to upgrade to a Zero Trust networking model instead, with a private network running on Cloudflare and rules based on identity, not IP address.

To learn how, keep reading or watch the demo below.

Deprecating the castle-and-moat model

Private networks provided security by assuming that the network should trust you by virtue of you being in a place where you could physically connect. If you could enter an office and connect to the network, the network assumed that you should be trusted and allowed to reach any other destination on that network. When work happened inside the closed walls of offices, with security based on the physical door to the building, that model at least offered some basic protections.

That model fell apart when users left the offices. Even before the pandemic sent employees home, roaming users or branch offices relied on virtual private networks (VPNs) to punch holes back into the private network. Users had to authenticate to the VPN but, once connected, still had the freedom to reach almost any resource. With more holes in the firewall, and full lateral movement, this model became a risk to any security organization.

However, the alternative was painful or unavailable to most teams. Building network segmentation rules required complex configuration and still relied on source IPs instead of identity. Even with that level of investment in network segmentation, organizations still had to trust the IP of the user rather than the user’s identity.

These types of IP-based rules served as band-aids while the rest of the use cases in an organization moved into the future. Resources like web applications migrated to models that used identity, multi-factor authentication, and continuous enforcement while networking security went unchanged.

But private networks can be great!

There are still great reasons to use private networks for applications and resources. It can be easier and faster to create and share something on a private network instead of waiting to create a public DNS and IP record.

Also, IPs are more easily discarded and reused across internal networks. You do not need to give every team member permission to edit public DNS records. And in some cases, regulatory and security requirements flat out prohibit tools being exposed publicly on the Internet.

Private networks should not disappear, but the usability and security compromises they require should stay in the past. Two months ago, we announced the ability to build a private network on Cloudflare. This feature allows your team to replace VPN appliances and clients with a network that has a point of presence in over 200 cities around the world.

Introducing Zero Trust Private Networking
Zero Trust rules are enforced on the Cloudflare edge

While that release helped us address the usability compromises of a traditional VPN, today’s announcement handles the security compromises. You can now build identity-based, Zero Trust policies inside that private network. This means that you can lock down specific CIDR ranges or IP addresses based on a user’s identity, group, device or network. You can also control and log every connection without additional hardware or services.

How it works

Cloudflare’s daemon, cloudflared, is used to create a secure TCP tunnel from your network to Cloudflare’s edge. This tunnel is private and can only be accessed by connections that you authorize. On their side, users can deploy Cloudflare WARP on their machines to forward their network traffic to Cloudflare’s edge — this allows them to hit specific private IP addresses. Since Cloudflare has 200+ data centers across the globe, all of this occurs without any traffic backhauls or performance penalties.

With today’s release, we now enforce in-line network firewall policies as well. All traffic arriving to Cloudflare’s edge will be evaluated by the Layer 4 firewall. So while you can choose to enable or disable the Layer 7 firewall or bypass HTTP inspection for a given domain, all TCP traffic arriving to Cloudflare will traverse the Layer 4 firewall. Network-level policies will allow you to match traffic that arrives from (or is destined to) data centers, branch offices, and remote users based on the following traffic criteria:

  • Source IP address or CIDR in the header
  • Destination IP address or CIDR in the header
  • Source port or port range in the header
  • Destination port or port range in the header

With these criteria in place, you can enforce identity-aware policies down to a specific port across your entire network plane.

Get started with Zero Trust networking

There are a few things you’ll want to have configured before building your Zero Trust private network policies (we cover these in detail in our previous private networking post):

  • Install cloudflared on your private network
  • Route your private IP addresses to Cloudflare’s edge
  • Deploy the WARP client to your users’ machines

Once the initial setup is complete, this is how you can configure your Zero Trust network policies on the Teams Dashboard:

1. Create a new network policy in Gateway.

Introducing Zero Trust Private Networking

2. Specify the IP and Port combination you want to allow access to. In this example, we are exposing an RDP port on a specific private IP address.

Introducing Zero Trust Private Networking

3. Add any desired identity policies to your network policy. In this example, we have limited access to users in a “Developers” group specified in the identity provider.

Introducing Zero Trust Private Networking

Once this policy is configured, only users in the specific identity group running the WARP client will be able to access applications on the specified IP and port combination.

And that’s it. Without any additional software or configuration, we have created an identity-aware network policy for all of my users that will work on any machine or network across the world while maintaining Zero Trust. Existing infrastructure can be securely exposed in minutes not hours or days.

What’s Next

We want to make this even easier to use and more secure. In the coming months, we are planning to add support for Private DNS resolution, Private IP conflict management and granular session control for private network policies. Additionally, for now this flow only works for client-to-server (WARP to cloudflared) connections. Coming soon, we’ll introduce support for east-west connections that will allow teams to connect cloudflared and other parts of Cloudflare One routing.

Getting started is easy — open your Teams Dashboard and follow our documentation.

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice

Post Syndicated from Alice Bracchi original https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-teams-dashboard-finding-a-product-voice/

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice

My name is Alice Bracchi, and I’m the technical and UX writer for Cloudflare for Teams, Cloudflare’s Zero Trust and Secure Web Gateway solution.

Today I want to talk about product voice — what it is, why it matters, and how I set out to find a product voice for Cloudflare for Teams.

On the Cloudflare for Teams Dashboard (or as we informally call it, “the Teams Dash”), our customers have full control over the security of their network. Administrators can replace their VPN with a solution that runs on Zero Trust rules, turning Cloudflare’s network into their secure corporate network. Customers can secure all traffic by configuring L7 firewall rules and DNS filtering policies, and organizations have the ability to isolate web browsing to suspicious sites.

All in one place.

As you can see, a lot of action takes place on the Teams Dash. As an interface, it grows and changes at a rapid pace. This poses a lot of interesting challenges from a design point of view — in our early days, because we were focused on solving problems fast, many of our experiences ended up feeling a bit disjointed. Sure, users were able to follow paths within any given feature, but those features did not always work across the Dash in a seamless way.

Early this week we talked about how we’re leaving our “solution pollution” days behind and moving towards a design-led approach. To me, as the writer on the team, this means it’s time to step up our UX writing game and find our own product voice — a unique voice that reflects our product identity and speaks to our users in a recognizable “Teams way”.

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice

But what exactly is a product voice?

As users, we love experiences and products we recognize. We’re loyal to them. It’s all about consistency, and the sense of familiarity that comes with it. When design and copy work hand in hand to convey a consistent feel, we soon learn to recognize the personality of an interface. Because every little detail has been curated for us, we’re rarely caught by surprise  — our experience just feels smooth.

Think about it in terms of human interactions. When picking up a call from a friend, we immediately recognize their voice. We don’t think about the why or how — we just unconsciously do, and start chatting away. However, imagine that friend suddenly uttered a sentence in a completely different voiceprint (spooky, right?). Imagine they started using words or expressions that never belonged in their vocabulary. We would notice right away.

Interactions through UX writing work in a similar way. Users notice right away when a piece of copy doesn’t sound as it should. So when working on copy for our interface, we need a consistent, recognizable product voice. A product voice is a set of principles and guidelines that standardize how we sound to our users. It will determine whether we put exclamation marks in our greetings (“Welcome!”), whether we include interjections in our error messages (“Uh-oh!”), whether we address the user with “you” or prefer a more impersonal approach. It will show our personality and shape what users can expect from us.

And the Teams dashboard needed just that — to find its own voice.

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice

Hundreds of sticky notes

A voice isn’t going to be very successful for a product if it only sounds right to the writer crafting it, I reasoned. It needs to ring true to the people who build and breathe the product every day — our product managers, our designers, our engineers. In the end, a product voice will truly shine only if it’s aligned with product principles. And as a product team, we’d been so caught up shipping features and solving problems that we’d never sat down to brainstorm on our principles.

So the path was clear to me.

  1. First, we needed to define our product principles.
  2. From our principles, we would derive a product voice that matched our core values.
  3. Last but not least, we would draft UX writing guidelines on how to write in our newly found product voice.

My idea was for this process to be as collaborative as possible, so I set up a series of brainstorming sessions with my teammates. I met with the product managers first, then with designers, engineers, and finally the marketing/go-to-market team. Each group gathered around a virtual board, and received the same prompts from me. I asked participants to focus on the ideal product they wanted Teams to grow into. Everyone worked independently on their own corner of the board — I was interested in every participant’s uninfluenced inputs.

Here are the prompts I gave:

  1. List all the words you associate with Teams.
    We called this question the “brain dump.” I gave people two minutes and a half to be  instinctive, creative, and give me all the words they could think of.
  2. Teams helps users by _______.
    With this question, I wanted people to focus on our everyday life. What do we do for our customers? Which problems are we trying to solve?
  3. In terms of experience, I’d love users to associate Teams with ____ (brand).
    Again, I was after instinctive associations. Ideally, I wanted a list of websites I could later explore to see whether we could draw inspiration from them in terms of content.
  4. Teams is unique because [it’s] ________.
    I asked people to focus on the qualities that set us apart in the market. What makes the product stand out?

Once I had all the answers, I classified sticky notes by lexical and conceptual association. Some patterns emerged. We had sticky notes describing who we are, who we’re not, what we do, our features, our technology, and what we care about. Once every sticky note had been grouped, I had a pretty good idea of the themes I could work with to draft our product principles.

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice

The words behind our product principles

I labeled each theme/principle with an adjective that could represent it and that could answer the question: what kind of product do we want to be for our users?

  1. Reassuring. This was the first principle I worked on. Semantically, it reflects the core purpose of Teams — we’re a network security product, so our job is to protect. Under this principle I gathered all the words pertaining to the concepts of security, protection, and reassurance. People even used metaphors to express this concept: we’re a bodyguard. An armored truck.
  2. Transparent. Another popular theme was our extensive analytics features, and the visibility they give to our admin users. This principle groups words whose root is in one way or another connected to the sense of sight: observing, monitoring, visibility, keeping an eye on. Interestingly enough, other words were more oriented towards the semantics of forensics: investigate, find, detect. For the main descriptor, I finally settled on transparent, because our product is a pane of glass (another metaphor that was used) that the admin can see through and know instantly whether something needs investigating.
  3. Easy to use. This is a very ambitious principle for us. Network security is not an easy topic — it is our job to make it easy. All groups I brainstormed with gave huge importance to simplicity in one shape or another. Many stated our interface needs to be clean, accessible, approachable, digestible, direct. But we also vow to be inclusive, helpful and guiding, and never to assume knowledge.
  4. Trailblazing. There was a clear theme around Teams being new on the market, but already showing the way. Modern recurred in most brainstorming sessions. Closely related descriptors, but stronger, were visionary and trailblazing, which I ended up choosing as the title of this principle, because it conveys the energy of a product that’s energetic and fresh.
  5. Frictionless. This principle is all about a product that just works. Some words I’ve grouped under this principle describe two ways in which Teams aims at removing friction. First, Teams should aim at integrating with other systems. Second, Teams should be invisible. Our product is designed to be hardly noticeable by end users, and works behind the scenes.
  6. Adaptive. This principle has two sides to it. The first is represented by resilience and Teams’ ability to adapt to circumstances (think concepts like adaptable, ready to change, and built in 2020). The second side is more about our ability to adapt to user needs. Here’s where our user-centered nature comes out: we let user needs shape our evolution as a product.

What about our voice?

I went back to my sticky notes, this time to find and group words that could help us define the product’s personality, or more specifically, its attitude towards communication. Out of those groups, I chose five descriptors:

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice
  1. Straightforward. We know the value of effective and concise language. We give the right amount of information at the right time.
  2. Helpful. We offer tips and guidance, and we ensure users are never left to figure things out by themselves.
  3. Friendly. We’re happy our users are around. We empathize with them. We’re the warm and welcoming ones.
  4. Fresh.  We’re a new, informal, geeky product. We address the user as if they were sitting beside us. We’re like a nerdy friend offering to fix your computer.
  5. Controlled. We’re in control. No panic, no crazy excitement. We do not overreact.

As a next step, I crafted a voice matrix, slightly adapting Torrey Podmajersky’s approach in Strategic Writing for UX. I assigned a column to each voice trait and defined what each of them entails in terms of content, vocabulary, syntax, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization choices. This voice matrix summarizes the dos and don’ts of UX writing for the Teams Dashboard.

As I was filling out this chart, I noticed that most guidelines I came up with for the friendly trait also worked well for the fresh voice trait. Ultimately, I thought, it all boils down to a certain feeling of warmth in our communication — a feeling made possible both by our friendly nature and by our fresh, informal approach. In the end, I decided to merge those traits into the friendly principle.

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice

What I learned

This project has been an incredible journey to the heart of the product. I cherish the many creative conversations I had with my teammates about Teams. It was a chance for us to hit pause for a second, forget about deadlines and our everyday tasks, take a step back and focus on why we’re building what we’re building. It feels really good to have our principles written down, and we want to publish them soon on our product page for you to explore them.

Naturally, the project has also helped my writing tremendously. Every time I sit down to write a line of UX copy, I don’t just refer back to these four voice descriptors and their guidelines — I also write with the six product principles firmly in the back of my mind.

I’ve bookmarked the board with our sticky notes in my browser. It’s always there for me, and it contains the raw material I fall back on whenever I need inspiration.

The Teams Dashboard: Finding a Product Voice

What’s next

This is just the beginning and the high-level structure of our strategy. In time and with iteration, we’ll build out these principles to become full-fledged UX writing guidelines, as well as a set of patterns that will allow us to achieve true consistency throughout the Teams Dashboard. Keep an eye on copy changes and see if you can hear our new voice take shape.

Next week we’ll introduce our Design team and their vision. Stay tuned!

The Teams Dashboard: Behind the Scenes

Post Syndicated from Abe Carryl original https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-teams-dashboard-behind-the-scenes/

The Teams Dashboard: Behind the Scenes

The Teams Dashboard: Behind the Scenes

Back in 2010, Cloudflare was introduced at TechCrunch Disrupt as a security and performance solution that took the tools of the biggest service providers and made them available to anyone online. But simply replicating these tools wasn’t enough — we needed to make them ridiculously easy to use.

When we launched Cloudflare for Teams almost ten years later, the vision was very much the same — build a secure and powerful Zero Trust solution that is ridiculously easy to use. However, while we talk about what we’re building with a regular cadence, we often gloss over how we are designing Cloudflare for Teams to make it simple and easy to use.

In this blog post we’ll do just that — if that sounds like your jam, keep scrolling.

Building a house

First, let’s back up a bit and introduce Cloudflare for Teams.

We launched Cloudflare for Teams in January, 2020. With Teams, we wanted to alleviate the burden Cloudflare customers were feeling when trying to protect themselves and their infrastructure from threats online. We knew that continuing to rely on expensive hardware would be difficult to maintain and impractical to scale.

At its core, Teams joins two products together — Access and Gateway. On the one hand, Access acts as a bouncer at the door of all your applications, checking the identity of everyone who wants in. It’s a Zero Trust solution that secures inbound connections. On the other hand, Gateway is a Secure Web Gateway solution that acts as your organization’s bodyguard — it secures your users as they set out to navigate the Internet.

Over the past year, we’ve been rapidly shipping features to help our customers face the new and daunting challenges 2020 brought around. However, that velocity often took a toll on the intentionality of how we design the Teams Dashboard, and resulted in a myriad of unintended consequences. This is often referred to as a “Feature Shop” dilemma, where Product and Design only think about what they’re building and become too resource-constrained to consider why they’re building it.

In an interface, this pattern often manifests itself through siloed functionality and fractured experiences. And admittedly, when we first began building the Teams Dashboard, many of our experiences felt this way. Users were able to take singular features from inception to fruition, but were limited in their ability to thread these experiences together in a seamless fashion across the Dashboard.

The duplex problem

Here’s an example. In the early days of Cloudflare for Teams, we wanted to provide users with a single pane of glass to manage their security policies. In order to do so, users would need to onboard to both Access and Gateway. Only one problem, we didn’t have an onboarding pathway for Cloudflare Access. The obvious question became “What do we need?”. Inherently, the answer was an onboarding flow for Cloudflare Access.

Just like that, we were off to the races.

In retrospect, what we should have been asking instead was “Why do users need onboarding flow?” By focusing on what, we polluted our own ability to build the right solution for this problem. Instead of providing a seamless entryway to our dashboard, we created a fork-in-the-road decision point and siloed our customers into two separate paths that did not make it easy for them to approach our dashboard.

From an experiential perspective, we later equated this to inviting our users to a party. We give them an address, but when they show up at the doorstep, they realize the house is actually a duplex. Which doorbell are they supposed to ring? Where’s the party? What will they find if they walk into the wrong unit?

The Teams Dashboard: Behind the Scenes

Leading with Design

That’s where Design fits in. Our design team is hyper-obsessed with asking why. Why are we throwing a party? Why should anyone come? Why should they stay? By challenging our team to lead with design, we take a questioning attitude to each of the features we contemplate building. With this approach, we do not assume a feature is valuable, intuitive, or even required. We assume nothing.

During our “Feature Shop” days, we had a bad habit of providing “bad mockups” or outlining a solution for Design to prototype. This is often referred to as “solution pollution”. For example, if I tell you I need a fast car, you’re probably going to start designing a car. However, if instead I tell you I need to get from point A to point B as quick as possible, you may end up designing a bike, scooter, car, or something entirely new and novel. Design thrives in this balance.

Now, we begin at the beginning and gather contextual data which drove us toward a given feature hypothesis. Together, Product and Design then research the problem alongside the users it may impact. More importantly, once the problem space has been validated, we partner on the solution itself.

With this new approach in mind, we revisited our onboarding experience, and this time, the solution we arrived at was quite different from our initial prototypes. Instead of creating two divergent pathways we now proposed a single Cloudflare for Teams onboarding flow. This solved the duplex problem.

The Teams Dashboard: Behind the Scenes

This flow prioritized two key elements; preparing users for success and emphasizing time-to-value. During initial research, Design was able to identify that users often felt overwhelmed and underprepared for the configuration required during an early onboarding. Additionally, due to this sentiment, users failed to reach an initial “Aha!” moment until much later than anticipated in their user journey. To address these concerns, we truncated the onboarding process to just three simple steps:

  • Welcome to Teams
  • Create a Team Name
  • Pick a Plan

As simple as that. Then, we created a Quick Start guide which users land on after onboarding. Let’s call this our inboarding flow. Next, we created a variety of “Starter Packs” within the guide which automate much the laborious configuration for users so they can start realizing value from Cloudflare for Teams almost instantly:

The Teams Dashboard: Behind the Scenes

What’s next

Moving forward, we will continue to expand on the Quick Start guide adding more robust starter packs and enhancing the opportunities for continuous learning. We’re also looking to incorporate intelligent recommendations based on your environment. We’ll also be releasing other improvements this quarter which apply the same underlying concepts found in our Quick Start guide to other areas of the UI such as our Empty States and Overview pages.

Perhaps most importantly, by leading with Design we’re able to foster healthy debate early and often for the products and features we consider releasing within the UI. These relationships drive us to map risks to controls and force us to build with care and intentionality. After all, we all have the same mission: to help build a better Internet.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Cloudflare for Teams design lifecycle, stay tuned. We have three upcoming blog releases which will walk you through our product content strategy, our design vision, and an exciting new feature release where you can see this partnership in action.

Configure identity-based policies in Cloudflare Gateway

Post Syndicated from Pete Zimmerman original https://blog.cloudflare.com/configure-identity-based-policies-in-cloudflare-gateway/

Configure identity-based policies in Cloudflare Gateway

Configure identity-based policies in Cloudflare Gateway

During Zero Trust Week in October, we released HTTP filtering in Cloudflare Gateway, which expands protection beyond DNS threats to those at the HTTP layer as well. With this feature, Cloudflare WARP proxies all Internet traffic from an enrolled device to a data center in our network. Once there, Cloudflare Gateway enforces organization-wide rules to prevent data loss and protect team members.

However, rules are not one-size-fits-all. Corporate policies can vary between groups or even single users. For example, we heard from customers who want to stop users from uploading files to cloud storage services except for a specific department that works with partners. Beyond filtering, security teams asked for the ability to audit logs on a user-specific basis. If a user account was compromised, they needed to know what happened during that incident.

We’re excited to announce the ability for administrators to create policies based on a user’s identity and correlate that identity to activity in the Gateway HTTP logs. Your team can reuse the same identity provider integration configured in Cloudflare Access and start building policies tailored to your organization today.

Fine-grained rule enforcement

Until today, organizations could protect their users’ Internet-bound traffic by configuring DNS and HTTP policies that applied to every user. While that makes it simple to configure policies to enforce content restrictions and mitigate security threats, any IT administrator knows that for every policy there’s an exception to that policy.

Configure identity-based policies in Cloudflare Gateway

For example, a corporate content policy might restrict users from accessing social media —  which is not ideal for a marketing team that needs to manage digital marketing campaigns. Administrators can now configure a rule in Gateway to ensure a marketing team can always reach social media from their corporate devices.

Configure identity-based policies in Cloudflare Gateway

To meet corporate policy requirements for the rest of the organization, the administrator can then build a second rule to block all social media. They can drag-and-drop that rule below the marketing team’s rule, giving it a lower precedence so that anyone not in marketing will instead be evaluated against this policy.

Configure identity-based policies in Cloudflare Gateway

Identity integration and filtering options

Cloudflare Gateway leverages the integration between your chosen identity provider (IdP) and Cloudflare Access to add identity to rules and logs. Customers can integrate one or more providers at the same time, including corporate providers like Okta and Azure AD, as well as public providers like GitHub and LinkedIn.

Configure identity-based policies in Cloudflare Gateway

When users first launch the WARP client, they will be prompted to authenticate with one of the providers configured. Once logged in, Cloudflare Gateway can send their traffic through your organization’s policies and attribute each connection to the user’s identity.

Depending on what your IdP supports, you can create rules based on the following attributes:

Attribute Example
User Name John Doe
User Email [email protected]
User Group Name* Marketing Team
User Group Email* [email protected]
User Group ID 1234

*Note: some IdPs use group email in place of a group name

Cloudflare Gateway gives teams the ability to create fine-grained rules that meet the real needs of IT administrators. But policy enforcement is only one side of the equation — protecting users and preventing corporate data loss requires visibility into Internet traffic across an organization, for auditing compliance or security incident investigations.

User-level visibility in activity logs

In addition to the ability to create identity-based rules, IT administrators can use the Gateway activity logs to filter the HTTP traffic logs for specific users and device IDs. This is critical for reasons with varying degrees of seriousness: on one end an administrator can identify users who are attempting to bypass content security policies, and on the other end, that administrator can identify users or devices that may be compromised.

Configure identity-based policies in Cloudflare Gateway

Securing your team from Internet threats requires IT or security administrators to keep pace with evolving attackers and, just as importantly, maintain full visibility on what’s happening to your users and data. Cloudflare Gateway now allows you to do both, so your team can get back to what matters.

One more thing

At the end of Zero Trust Week, we announced our Cloudflare Isolated Browser to protect organizations from Internet threats unknown to threat intelligence (i.e., zero-day attacks). By integrating with Gateway, organizations can use the Remote Browser to provide higher levels of security to individual users who might be targets of spear phishing campaigns.

For example, consider an employee in the finance department who interfaces with systems handling procurements or fund disbursement. A security team might consider preventing this employee from accessing the public Internet with their native browser and forcing that traffic into an isolated remote browser. Any traffic destined to internal systems would use the native browser. To create this policy, an administrator could create the following rules:

Configure identity-based policies in Cloudflare Gateway

While other Gateway rules protect you from known threats, the isolate rule can help guard against everything else. Your team can build rules that isolate traffic based on identity or content without requiring the user to switch between browsers or client applications.

Cloudflare Browser Isolation is available in private beta today; you can sign up to join the wait list here.

What’s next?

We’re excited to bring customers with us on our journey to providing a full Secure Web Gateway with features such as network-level rules, in-line anti-virus scanning, and data loss prevention. This feature is available to any Gateway Standard or Teams customer at no additional cost. We plan to extend these capabilities from individual remote users to branch offices and data centers.

Our goal is dead-simple integration and configuration of products that secure your users and data, so you can focus on bringing your own products into the world — we’re thrilled to help you do that. Follow this link to get started.

A quirk in the SUNBURST DGA algorithm

Post Syndicated from Nick Blazier original https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-quirk-in-the-sunburst-dga-algorithm/

A quirk in the SUNBURST DGA algorithm

A quirk in the SUNBURST DGA algorithm

On Wednesday, December 16, the RedDrip Team from QiAnXin Technology released their discoveries (tweet, github) regarding the random subdomains associated with the SUNBURST malware which was present in the SolarWinds Orion compromise. In studying queries performed by the malware, Cloudflare has uncovered additional details about how the Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) encodes data and exfiltrates the compromised hostname to the command and control servers.

Background

The RedDrip team discovered that the DNS queries are created by combining the previously reverse-engineered unique guid (based on hashing of hostname and MAC address) with a payload that is a custom base 32 encoding of the hostname. The article they published includes screenshots of decompiled or reimplemented C# functions that are included in the compromised DLL. This background primer summarizes their work so far (which is published in Chinese).

RedDrip discovered that the DGA subdomain portion of the query is split into three parts:

<encoded_guid> + <byte> + <encoded_hostname>

An example malicious domain is:

7cbtailjomqle1pjvr2d32i2voe60ce2.appsync-api.us-east-1.avsvmcloud.com

Where the domain is split into the three parts as

Encoded guid (15 chars) byte Encoded hostname
7cbtailjomqle1p j vr2d32i2voe60ce2

The work from the RedDrip Team focused on the encoded hostname portion of the string, we have made additional insights related to the encoded hostname and encoded guid portions.

At a high level the encoded hostnames take one of two encoding schemes. If all of the characters in the hostname are contained in the set of domain name-safe characters "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz-_." then the OrionImprovementBusinessLayer.CryptoHelper.Base64Decode algorithm, explained in the article, is used. If there are characters outside of that set in the hostname, then the OrionImprovementBusinessLayer.CryptoHelper.Base64Encode is used instead and ‘00’ is prepended to the encoding. This allows us to simply check if the first two characters of the encoded hostname are ‘00’ and know how the hostname is encoded.

These function names within the compromised DLL are meant to resemble the names of legitimate functions, but in fact perform the message encoding for the malware. The DLL function Base64Decode is meant to resemble the legitimate function name base64decode, but its purpose is actually to perform the encoding of the query (which is a variant of base32 encoding).

The RedDrip Team has posted Python code for encoding and decoding the queries, including identifying random characters inserted into the queries at regular character intervals.

One potential issue we encountered with their implementation is the inclusion of a check clause looking for a ‘0’ character in the encoded hostname (line 138 of the decoding script). This line causes the decoding algorithm to ignore any encoded hostnames that do not contain a ‘0’. We believe this was included because ‘0’ is the encoded value of a ‘0’, ‘.’, ‘-’ or ‘_’. Since fully qualified hostnames are comprised of multiple parts separated by ‘.’s, e.g. ‘example.com’, it makes sense to be expecting a ‘.’ in the unencoded hostname and therefore only consider encoded hostnames containing a ‘0’. However, this causes the decoder to ignore many of the recorded DGA domains.

As we explain below, we believe that long domains are split across multiple queries where the second half is much shorter and unlikely to include a ‘.’. For example ‘www2.example.c’ takes up one message, meaning that in order to transmit the entire domain ‘www2.example.c’ a second message containing just ‘om’ would also need to be sent. This second message does not contain a ‘.’ so its encoded form does not contain a ‘0’ and it is ignored in the RedDrip team’s implementation.

The quirk: hostnames are split across multiple queries

A list of observed queries performed by the malware was published publicly on GitHub. Applying the decoding script to this set of queries, we see some queries appear to be truncated, such as grupobazar.loca, but also some decoded hostnames are curiously short or incomplete, such as “com”, “.com”, or a single letter, such as “m”, or “l”.

When the hostname does not fit into the available payload section of the encoded query, it is split up across multiple queries. Queries are matched up by matching the GUID section after applying a byte-by-byte exclusive-or (xor).

Analysis of first 15 characters

Noticing that long domains are split across multiple requests led us to believe that the first 16 characters encoded information to associate multipart messages. This would allow the receiver on the other end to correctly re-assemble the messages and get the entire domain. The RedDrip team identified the first 15 bytes as a GUID, we focused on those bytes and will refer to them subsequently as the header.

We found the following queries that we believed to be matches without knowing yet the correct pairings between message 1 and message 2 (payload has been altered):

Part 1 – Both decode to “www2.example.c”
r1q6arhpujcf6jb6qqqb0trmuhd1r0ee.appsync-api.us-west-2.avsvmcloud.com
r8stkst71ebqgj66qqqb0trmuhd1r0ee.appsync-api.us-west-2.avsvmcloud.com

Part 2 – Both decode to “om”
0oni12r13ficnkqb2h.appsync-api.us-west-2.avsvmcloud.com
ulfmcf44qd58t9e82h.appsync-api.us-west-2.avsvmcloud.com

This gives us a final combined payload of www2.example.com

This example gave us two sets of messages where we were confident the second part was associated with the first part, and allowed us to find the following relationship where message1 is the header of the first message and message2 is the header of the second:

Base32Decode(message1) XOR KEY = Base32Decode(message2)

The KEY is a single character. That character is xor’d with each byte of the Base32Decoded first header to produce the Base32Decoded second header. We do not currently know how to infer what character is used as the key, but we can still match messages together without that information. Since A XOR B = C where we know A and C but not B, we can instead use A XOR C = B. This means that in order to pair messages together we simply need to look for messages where XOR’ing them together results in a repeating character (the key).

Base32Decode(message1) XOR Base32Decode(message2) = KEY

Looking at the examples above this becomes

Message 1 Message 2
Header r1q6arhpujcf6jb 0oni12r13ficnkq
Base32Decode (binary) 101101000100110110111111011
010010000000011001010111111
01111000101001110100000101
110110010010000011010010000
001000110110110100111100100
00100011111111000000000100

We’ve truncated the results slightly, but below shows the two binary representations and the third line shows the result of the XOR.

101101000100110110111111011010010000000011001010111111011110001010011101
110110010010000011010010000001000110110110100111100100001000111111110000
011011010110110101101101011011010110110101101101011011010110110101101101

We can see the XOR result is the repeating sequence ‘01101101’meaning the original key was 0x6D or ‘m’.

We provide the following python code as an implementation for matching paired messages (Note: the decoding functions are those provided by the RedDrip team):

# string1 is the first 15 characters of the first message
# string2 is the first 15 characters of the second message
def is_match(string1, string2):
    encoded1 = Base32Decode(string1)
    encoded2 = Base32Decode(string2)
    xor_result = [chr(ord(a) ^ ord(b)) for a,b in zip(encoded1, encoded2)]
    match_char = xor_result[0]
    for character in xor_result[0:9]:
        if character != match_char:
            return False, None
    return True, "0x{:02X}".format(ord(match_char))

The following are additional headers which based on the payload content Cloudflare is confident are pairs (the payload has been redacted because it contains hostname information that is not yet publicly available):

Example 1:

vrffaikp47gnsd4a
aob0ceh5l8cr6mco

xorkey: 0x4E

Example 2:

vrffaikp47gnsd4a
aob0ceh5l8cr6mco

xorkey: 0x54

Example 3:

vvu7884g0o86pr4a
6gpt7s654cfn4h6h

xorkey: 0x2B

We hypothesize that the xorkey can be derived from the header bytes and/or padding byte of the two messages, though we have not yet determined the relationship.

Trend data on the SolarWinds Orion compromise

Post Syndicated from Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz original https://blog.cloudflare.com/solarwinds-orion-compromise-trend-data/

Trend data on the SolarWinds Orion compromise

Trend data on the SolarWinds Orion compromise

On Sunday, December 13, FireEye released a report on a sophisticated supply chain attack leveraging SolarWinds’ Orion IT monitoring software. The malware was distributed as part of regular updates to Orion and had a valid digital signature.

One of the notable features of the malware is the way it hides its network traffic using a multi-staged approach. First, the malware determines its command and control (C2) server using a domain generation algorithm (DGA) to construct and resolve a subdomain of avsvmcloud[.]com.

These algorithmically generated strings are added as a subdomain of one of the following domain names to create a new fully-qualified domain name to resolve:

.appsync-api[.]eu-west-1[.]avsvmcloud[.]com
.appsync-api[.]us-west-2[.]avsvmcloud[.]com
.appsync-api[.]us-east-1[.]avsvmcloud[.]com
.appsync-api[.]us-east-2[.]avsvmcloud[.]com

An example of such a domain name might look like: hig4gcdkgjkrt24v6isue7ax09nksd[.]appsync-api[.]eu-west-1[.]avsvmcloud[.]com

The DNS query response to a subdomain of one of the above will return a CNAME record that points to another C2 domain, which is used for data exfiltration. The following subdomains were identified as the C2 domains used for data exfiltration:

freescanonline[.]com
deftsecurity[.]com
thedoccloud[.]com
websitetheme[.]com
highdatabase[.]com
incomeupdate[.]com
databasegalore[.]com
panhardware[.]com
zupertech[.]com
virtualdataserver[.]com
digitalcollege[.]org

Malware activity seen on Cloudflare’s public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1

Using the published details about the network observables of the malware, we analyzed DNS query traffic to the identified malicious hostnames. Because 1.1.1.1 has a strong, audited privacy policy, we are unable to identify the source IP of users connecting to the malicious hostname — we can only see aggregated trends.

We first noticed a spike in DNS traffic through Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver to avsvmcloud[.]com starting in April 2020:

Trend data on the SolarWinds Orion compromise

Reviewing the subdomain data, a specific pattern of DGA domains emerged as early as April. These subdomains followed a format, (e.g. {dga-string}[.]appsync-api[.]{region}[.]avsvmcloud[.]com). As time went on, the attackers added more unique subdomains. The graph below depicts the unique newly observed subdomains of avsvmcloud[.]com on a weekly basis.

Trend data on the SolarWinds Orion compromise

As illustrated in the graphs, we noticed a major rise in activity over the summer, with total subdomains observed reaching steady state in September.

Trend data on the SolarWinds Orion compromise

While the growth of unique names slowed down starting in October, the geographic distribution continued to change during the entire course of the attack. During the first few weeks of the attack, queries originated almost entirely from clients in North America and Europe. In May, the source of queries began to spread across the globe. By July, the queries began to cluster again, this time in South America, before returning to originate primarily from North America in November.

Trend data on the SolarWinds Orion compromise

Protecting our customers from malicious activity

Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver has strict privacy protections, so we can only see trends of this attack. We cannot notify users that they might be compromised, because we intentionally do not know who those users are. For customers of Cloudflare Gateway, however, we can help them block these types of threats, and identify cases where they might be compromised.

Cloudflare Gateway consists of features that secure how users and devices connect to the Internet. Gateway’s DNS filtering feature is built on the same technology that powers 1.1.1.1, and adds security filtering and logging.

Following the FireEye report, Cloudflare blocked access to the C2 domains used in this attack for customers using the “Malware” category in Gateway, as well as for customers using 1.1.1.1 for Families (1.1.1.2/3).

Our response team is working with customers to search logs for queries related to the malicious domains. Gateway customers can also download logs of their DNS query traffic and investigate on their own.

Announcing Workplace Records for Cloudflare for Teams

Post Syndicated from Matthew Prince original https://blog.cloudflare.com/work-jurisdiction-records-for-teams/

Announcing Workplace Records for Cloudflare for Teams

We wanted to close out Privacy & Compliance Week by talking about something universal and certain: taxes. Businesses worldwide pay employment taxes based on where their employees do work. For most businesses and in normal times, where employees do work has been relatively easy to determine: it’s where they come into the office. But 2020 has made everything more complicated, even taxes.

As businesses worldwide have shifted to remote work, employees have been working from “home” — wherever that may be. Some employees have taken this opportunity to venture further from where they usually are, sometimes crossing state and national borders.

Announcing Workplace Records for Cloudflare for Teams

In a lot of ways, it’s gone better than expected. We’re proud of helping provide technology solutions like Cloudflare for Teams that allow employees to work from anywhere and ensure they still have a fast, secure connection to their corporate resources. But increasingly we’ve been hearing from the heads of the finance, legal, and HR departments of our customers with a concern: “If I don’t know where my employees are, I have no idea where I need to pay taxes.”

Today we’re announcing the beta of a new feature for Cloudflare for Teams to help solve this problem: Workplace Records. Cloudflare for Teams uses Access and Gateway logs to provide the state and country from which employees are working. Workplace Records can be used to help finance, legal, and HR departments determine where payroll taxes are due and provide a record to defend those decisions.

Every location became a potential workplace

Before 2020, employees who frequently traveled could manage tax jurisdiction reporting by gathering plane tickets or keeping manual logs of where they spent time. It was tedious, for employees and our payroll team, but manageable.

The COVID pandemic transformed that chore into a significant challenge for our finance, legal, and HR teams. Our entire organization was suddenly forced to work remotely. If we couldn’t get comfortable that we knew where people were working, we worried we may be forced to impose somewhat draconian rules requiring employees to check-in. That didn’t seem very Cloudflare-y.

The challenge impacts individual team members as well. Reporting mistakes can lead to tax penalties for employees or amendments during filing season. Our legal team started to field questions from employees stuck in new regions because of travel restrictions. Our payroll team prepared for a backlog of amendments.

Announcing Workplace Records for Cloudflare for Teams

Logging jurisdiction without manual reporting

When team members open their corporate laptops and start a workday, they log in to Cloudflare Access — our Zero Trust tool that protects applications and data. Cloudflare Access checks their identity and other signals like multi-factor methods to determine if they can proceed. Importantly, the process also logs their region so we can enforce country-specific rules.

Our finance, legal, and HR teams worked with our engineering teams to use that model to create Workplace Records. We now have the confidence to know we can meet our payroll tax obligations without imposing onerous limitations on team members. We’re able to prepare and adjust, in real-time, while confidentially supporting our employees as they work remotely for wherever is most comfortable and productive for them.

Announcing Workplace Records for Cloudflare for Teams

Respecting team member privacy

Workplace Records only provides resolution within a taxable jurisdiction, not a specific address. The goal is to give only the information that finance, legal, and HR departments need to ensure they can meet their compliance obligations.

The system also generates these reports by capturing team member logins to work applications on corporate devices. We use the location of that login to determine “this was a workday from Texas”. If a corporate laptop is closed or stored away for the weekend, we aren’t capturing location logs. We’d rather team members enjoy time off without connecting.

Two clicks to enforce regional compliance

Workplace Records can also help ensure company policy compliance for a company’s teams. For instance, companies may have policies about engineering teams only creating intellectual property in countries in which transfer agreements are in place. Workplace Records can help ensure that engineering work isn’t being done in countries that may put the intellectual property at risk.

Announcing Workplace Records for Cloudflare for Teams

Administrators can build rules in Cloudflare Access to require that team members connect to internal or SaaS applications only from countries where they operate. Cloudflare’s network will check every request both for identity and the region from which they’re connecting.

We also heard from our own accounting teams that some regions enforce strict tax penalties when employees work without an incorporated office or entity. In the same way that you can require users to work only from certain countries, you can also block users from connecting to your applications from specific regions.

No deciphering required

When we started planning Workplace Records, our payroll team asked us to please not send raw data that added more work on them to triage and sort.

Available today, you can view the country of each login to internal systems on a per-user basis. You can export this data to an external SIEM and you can build rules that control access to systems by country.

Launching today in beta is a new UI that summarizes the working days spent in specific regions for each user. Workplace Records will add a company-wide report early in Q1. The service is available as a report for free to all Cloudflare for Teams customers.

Announcing Workplace Records for Cloudflare for Teams

Going forward, we plan to work with Human Capital Management (HCM), Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS), Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS), and Payroll providers to automatically integrate Workplace Records.

What’s next?

At Cloudflare, we know even after the pandemic we are going to be more tolerant of remote work than before. The more that we can allow our team to work remotely and ensure we are meeting our regulatory, compliance, and tax obligations, the more flexibility we will be able to provide.

Cloudflare for Teams with Workplace Records is helping solve a challenge for our finance, legal, and HR teams. Now with the launch of the beta, we hope we can help enable a more flexible and compliant work environment for all our Cloudflare for Teams customers.
This feature will be available to all Cloudflare for Teams subscribers early next week. You can start using Cloudflare for Teams today at no cost for up to 50 users, including the Workplace Records feature.

Announcing Workplace Records for Cloudflare for Teams

Introducing Cloudflare One Intel

Post Syndicated from Malavika Balachandran Tadeusz original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one-intel/

Introducing Cloudflare One Intel

Introducing Cloudflare One Intel

Earlier this week, we announced Cloudflare One, a single platform for networking and security management. Cloudflare One extends the speed, reliability, and security we’ve brought to Internet properties and applications over the last decade to make the Internet the new enterprise WAN.

Underpinning Cloudflare One is Cloudflare’s global network – today, our network spans more than 200 cities worldwide and is within milliseconds of nearly everyone connected to the Internet. Our network handles, on average, 18 million HTTP requests and 6 million DNS requests per second. With 1 billion unique IP addresses connecting to the Cloudflare network each day, we have one of the broadest views on Internet activity worldwide.

We see a large diversity of Internet traffic across our entire product suite. Every day, we block 72 billion cyberthreats. This visibility provides us with a unique position to understand and mitigate Internet threats, and enables us to see new threats and malware before anyone else.

At the beginning of this month, as part of our 10th Birthday Week, we launched Cloudflare Radar, which shares high-level trends with the general public based on our network’s aggregate data. The same data that powers that view of the Internet also gives us the ability to create new insights to keep your team safer.

Today, we are excited to announce the next phase of network and threat intelligence at Cloudflare: the launch of Cloudflare One Intel. Cloudflare One Intel streamlines network and security operations by converting the data we can gather on our network into actionable insights.

The challenge with the traditional security operations

Most enterprises use a large array of point solutions to ensure that the corporate network remains fast, available and secure. Security teams typically aggregate logs from these point solutions into their SIEM and create custom alerts for incident detection.

Once an incident has been detected, security teams will quickly respond with remediating actions to prevent data loss, such as removing a compromised device’s access controls or adding a malicious hostname or URL to a block list.

Along with incident remediation, security teams will conduct an investigation of the incident to uncover more details about the attacker. Pivoting across historical DNS records, SSL certificate fingerprints, malware samples, and other indicators of compromise, security researchers will try to uncover more details about an attacker. Linked indicators then get fed back onto block lists in point solutions to prevent subsequent attacks.

However, there are several challenges with traditional incident detection and response. Security operations teams are often overwhelmed by the plethora of logs and alerts. With threat intelligence, SIEMs, and control planes all in different platforms, incident detection, remediation and forensics can be slow, arduous, and expensive.

Improving Incident Response with Cloudflare One

We want to make network and security operations as streamlined as possible. Cloudflare One Intel helps network and security teams detect and respond to incidents more efficiently. That means bringing together insights from your network activity, global Internet intelligence, and automated remediation in a single platform.

As part of the mission to help security teams detect and block emerging security threats more efficiently we are releasing two features within Cloudflare Gateway: DNS tunneling detection and domain insights.

What is DNS Tunneling?

DNS tunneling is the misuse of the Domain Name System (DNS) protocol to encode another protocol’s data into a series of DNS queries and response messages. DNS tunneling is often used to circumvent a corporate firewall. For example, DNS tunneling might be used to visit a website that is blocked on the corporate firewall, distribute malware from a command & control server, or exfiltrate sensitive data.

DNS tunneling isn’t only used for malicious activities. One of the most common uses of DNS tunneling is by antivirus software, which will often use DNS tunneling to look up file signatures.

Blocking DNS tunneling using Cloudflare Gateway

Starting today, customers using Cloudflare Gateway can block hostnames associated with DNS tunneling using the “DNS Tunneling” filter in Gateway’s DNS filtering policies. This feature is available to all Gateway users at no additional cost.

You can begin using the filter by navigating to the Policies section of the Gateway product and selecting the “Security Threats” tab. Once you check the “DNS Tunneling” box, Gateway will automatically block any requests made by your organization’s users to domains on this list. Should you want to manually override any specific domains, you can use the “Domain Override” feature to remove the block policy on a specific domain.

Introducing Cloudflare One Intel

We previously included known malicious DNS tunnels in our “Anonymizer” category within Gateway’s security threat categories. We are now pulling that into its own category so that customers can have more granular visibility into threats on their network. Further, we are expanding the filter beyond known malicious DNS tunnels to include newly emerging threats, so that customers can block these threats as soon as we see them on our network.

How we use machine learning to detect DNS tunneling

Using machine learning, Cloudflare detects anomalous DNS request patterns and flags these requests as suspected DNS tunneling. Our model analyzes requests and detects anomalous behavior at a frequency of every five minutes.

Once a set of requests is flagged, we add the associated hostname to our “DNS Tunneling” category. We do not add hostnames of commonly allowed DNS tunnels to this list, such as those used by antivirus software.

Our model not only blocks hostnames associated with DNS tunneling seen on your network, but across the entire Cloudflare network. Processing over 500 billion DNS queries each day, we have unique insight into global DNS traffic patterns.

Adding transparency to security

Cloudflare’s unique insight into global Internet traffic is what powers the intelligence behind Cloudflare One. DNS tunneling detection is one example of how we use aggregated data from our network to improve Internet security for everyone. But, until now, that has been opaque to users.

Security teams investigating the threats that impact their organization need more transparency. Cloudflare One Intel consolidates the information we have about the potentially harmful sites and properties that can target your organization.

Starting today, with a single click, administrators reviewing logs in Cloudflare Gateway can get a comprehensive breakdown of any site being allowed or blocked.

In this expanded view, you can now click the “View Domain Insights” button, which will take you to the Cloudflare Radar Domain Insights page for the requested hostname. This feature is available to all Gateway users at no additional cost.

Introducing Cloudflare One Intel
Introducing Cloudflare One Intel

What’s Next

These new features are just the beginning of Cloudflare One Intel. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be rolling out more features across the Cloudflare One platform that will make our Internet intelligence more accessible and actionable. Stay tuned for premium features available in Cloudflare Radar for Cloudflare Gateway customers.

Get started now

Cloudflare Radar is available to everyone for free – you can check it out here and start exploring our Internet intelligence.

To protect your team from threats on the Internet that utilize DNS tunnelling, sign up for a Cloudflare Gateway account and use the Security filter setting to block DNS tunnelling attempts. DNS-based security and content filtering is available for free across every Gateway plan.

Introducing WARP for Desktop and Cloudflare for Teams

Post Syndicated from Kyle Krum original https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-for-desktop/

Introducing WARP for Desktop and Cloudflare for Teams

Introducing WARP for Desktop and Cloudflare for Teams

Cloudflare launched ten years ago to keep web-facing properties safe from attack and fast for visitors. Cloudflare customers owned Internet properties that they placed on our network. Visitors to those sites and applications enjoyed a faster experience, but that speed was not consistent for accessing Internet properties outside the Cloudflare network.

Over the last few years, we began building products that could help deliver a faster and safer Internet to everyone, not just visitors to sites on our network. We started with the first step to visiting any website, a DNS query, and released the world’s fastest public DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1. Any Internet user could improve the speed to connect to any website simply by changing their resolver.

While making the Internet faster for users, we also focused on making it more private. We built 1.1.1.1 to accelerate the last mile of connections, from user to our edge or other destinations on the Internet. Unlike other providers, we did not build it to sell ads.

Last year we went one step further to make the entire connection from a device both faster and safer when we launched Cloudflare WARP. With the push of a button, users could connect their mobile device to the entire Internet using a WireGuard tunnel through a Cloudflare data center near to them. Traffic to sites behind Cloudflare became even faster and a user’s experience with the rest of the Internet became more secure and private.

We brought that experience to desktops in beta earlier this year, and are excited to announce the general availability of Cloudflare WARP for desktop users today. The entire Internet can now be more secure and private regardless of how you connect.

Bringing the power of WARP to security teams everywhere

WARP made the Internet faster and more private for individual users everywhere. But as businesses embraced remote work models at scale, security teams struggled to extend the security controls they had enabled in the office to their remote workers. Today, we’re bringing everything our users have come to expect from WARP to security teams. The release also enables new functionality in our Cloudflare Gateway product.

Customers can use the Cloudflare WARP application to connect corporate desktops to Cloudflare Gateway for advanced web filtering. The Gateway features rely on the same performance and security benefits of the underlying WARP technology, now with security filtering available to the connection.

The result is a simple way for enterprises to protect their users wherever they are without requiring the backhaul of network traffic to a centralized security boundary. Instead, organizations can configure the WARP client application to securely and privately send remote users’ traffic through a Cloudflare data center near them. Gateway administrators apply policies to outbound Internet traffic proxied through the client, allowing organizations to protect users from threats on the Internet, and stop corporate data from leaving their organization.

Privacy, Security and Speed for Everyone

WARP was built on the philosophy that even people who don’t know what “VPN” stands for should be able to still easily get the protection a VPN offers. For those of us unfortunately very familiar with traditional corporate VPNs, something better was needed. Enter our own WireGuard implementation called BoringTun.

The WARP application uses BoringTun to encrypt all the traffic from your device and send it directly to Cloudflare’s edge, ensuring that no one in between is snooping on what you’re doing. If the site you are visiting is already a Cloudflare customer, the content is immediately sent down to your device. With WARP+ we use Argo Smart Routing to to devise the shortest path through our global network of data centers to reach whomever you are talking to.

Introducing WARP for Desktop and Cloudflare for Teams

Combined with the power of 1.1.1.1 (the world’s fastest public DNS resolver), WARP keeps your traffic secure, private and fast. Since nearly everything you do on the Internet starts with a DNS request, choosing the fastest DNS server across all your devices will accelerate almost everything you do online. Speed isn’t everything though, and while the connection between your application and a website may be encrypted, DNS lookups for that website were not. This allowed anyone, even your Internet Service Provider, to potentially snoop (and sell) on where you are going on the Internet.

Cloudflare will never snoop or sell your personal data. And if you use DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS to our 1.1.1.1 resolver, your DNS request will be sent over a secure channel. This means that if you use the 1.1.1.1 resolver then in addition to our privacy guarantees an eavesdropper can’t see your DNS requests. Don’t take our word for it though, earlier this year we published the results of a third-party privacy examination, something we’ll keep doing and wish others would do as well.

For Gateway customers, we are committed to privacy and trust and will never sell your personal data to third parties. While your administrator will have the ability to audit your organization’s traffic, create rules around how long data is retained, or create specific policies about where they can go, Cloudflare will never sell your personal data or use your personal data to retarget you with advertisements. Privacy and control of your organization’s data is in your hands.

Now integrated with Cloudflare Gateway

Traditionally, companies have used VPN solutions to gate access to corporate resources and keep devices secure with their filtering rules. These connections quickly became a point of failure (and intrusion vector) as organizations needed to manage and scale up VPN servers as traffic through their on premise servers grew. End users didn’t like it either. VPN servers were usually overwhelmed at peak times, the client was bulky and they were rarely made with performance in mind. And once a bad actor got in, they had access to everything.

Introducing WARP for Desktop and Cloudflare for Teams
Traditional VPN architecture‌‌

In January 2020, we launched Cloudflare for Teams as a replacement to this model. Cloudflare for Teams is built around two core products. Cloudflare Access is a Zero Trust solution allowing organizations to connect internal (and now, SaaS) applications to Cloudflare’s edge and build security rules to enforce safe access to them. No longer were VPNs a single entry point to your organization; users could work from anywhere and still get access. Cloudflare Gateway’s first features focused on protecting users from threats on the Internet with a DNS resolver and policy engine built for enterprises.

The strength and power of WARP clients, used today by millions of users around the world, will enable incredible new use cases for security teams:

  • Encrypt all user traffic – Regardless of your users’ location, all traffic from their device is encrypted with WARP and sent privately to the nearest WARP endpoint. This keeps your users and your organizations protected from whomever may be snooping. If you still used a traditional VPN on top of Access to encrypt user traffic, that is no longer needed.
  • WARP+ – Cloudflare offers a premium WARP+ service for customers who want additional speed benefits. That now comes packaged into Teams deployments. Any Teams customer who deploys the Teams client applications will automatically receive the premium speed benefits of WARP+.
  • Gateway for remote workers – Until today, Gateway required that you keep track of all your users’ IP addresses and build policies per location. This made it difficult to enforce policy or provide malware protection when a user took their device to a new location. With the client installed, these policies can be enforced anywhere.
  • L7 Firewall and user based policies – Today’s announcement of Cloudflare Gateway SWG and Secure DNS allows your organization to enforce device authentication to your Teams account, enabling you to build user-specific policies and force all traffic through the firewall.
  • Device and User auditing – Along with user and device policies, administrators will also be able to audit specific user and device traffic. Used in conjunction with logpush, this will allow your organization to do detailed level tracing in case of a breach or audit.
Introducing WARP for Desktop and Cloudflare for Teams

Enroll your organization to use the WARP client with Cloudflare for Teams

We know how hard it can be to deploy another piece of software in your organization, so we’ve worked hard to make deployment easy. To get started, just navigate to our sign-up page and create an account. If you already have an active account, you can bypass this step and head straight to the Cloudflare for Teams dashboard where you’ll be dropped directly into our onboarding flow. After you have signed up and configured your team, setup a Gateway policy and then choose one of the three ways to install the clients to enforce that policy from below:

Self Install
If you are a small organization without an IT department, asking your users to download the client themselves and type in the required settings is the fastest way to get going.

Introducing WARP for Desktop and Cloudflare for Teams
Manually join an organization‌‌

Scripted Install
Our desktop installers support the ability to quickly script the installation. In the case of Windows, this is as easy as this command line:

Cloudflare_WARP_Release-x64.msi /quiet ORGANIZATION="<insert your org>" SERVICE_MODE="warp" ENABLE="true" GATEWAY_UNIQUE_ID="<insert your gateway DoH domain>" SUPPORT_URL=”<mailto or http of your support person>"

Managed Device
Organizations with MDM tools like Intune or JAMF can deploy WARP to their entire fleet of devices from a single operation. Just as you preconfigure all other device settings, WARP can be set so that all end users need to do is login with your team’s identity provider by clicking on the Cloudflare WARP client after it has been deployed.

Introducing WARP for Desktop and Cloudflare for Teams
Microsoft Intune Configuration

For a complete list of the installation options, required fields and step by step instructions for all platforms see the WARP Client documentation.

What’s coming next

There is still more we want to build for both our consumer users of WARP and our Cloudflare for Teams customers. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the ones we are most excited about (and allowed to share):

  • New partner integrations with CrowdStrike and VMware Carbon Black (Tanium available today) will allow you to build even more comprehensive Cloudflare Access policies that check for device health before allowing users to connect to applications
  • Split Tunnel support will allow you or your organization to specify applications, sites or IP addresses that should be excluded from WARP. This will allow content like games, streaming services, or any application you choose to work outside the connection.
  • BYOD device support, especially for mobile clients. Enterprise users that are not on the clock should be able to easily toggle off “office mode,” so corporate policies don’t limit personal use of their personal devices.
  • We are still missing one major operating system from our client portfolio and Linux support is coming.

Download now

We are excited to finally share these applications with our customers. We’d especially like to thank our Cloudflare MVP’s, the 100,000+ beta users on desktop, and the millions of existing users on mobile who have helped grow WARP into what it is today.

You can download the applications right now from https://one.one.one.one

Cloudflare Gateway now protects teams, wherever they are

Post Syndicated from Pete Zimmerman original https://blog.cloudflare.com/gateway-swg/

Cloudflare Gateway now protects teams, wherever they are

Cloudflare Gateway now protects teams, wherever they are

In January 2020, we launched Cloudflare for Teams—a new way to protect organizations and their employees globally, without sacrificing performance. Cloudflare for Teams centers around two core products – Cloudflare Access and Cloudflare Gateway.

In March 2020, Cloudflare launched the first feature of Cloudflare Gateway, a secure DNS filtering solution powered by the world’s fastest DNS resolver. Gateway’s DNS filtering feature kept users safe by blocking DNS queries to potentially harmful destinations associated with threats like malware, phishing, or ransomware. Organizations could change the router settings in their office and, in about five minutes, keep the entire team safe.

Shortly after that launch, entire companies began leaving their offices. Users connected from initially makeshift home offices that have become permanent in the last several months. Protecting users and data has now shifted from a single office-level setting to user and device management in hundreds or thousands of locations.

Security threats on the Internet have also evolved. Phishing campaigns and malware attacks have increased in the last six months. Detecting those types of attacks requires looking deeper than just the DNS query.

Starting today, we’re excited to announce two features in Cloudflare Gateway that solve those new challenges. First, Cloudflare Gateway now integrates with the Cloudflare WARP desktop client. We built WARP around WireGuard, a modern, efficient VPN protocol that is much more efficient and flexible than legacy VPN protocols.

Second, Cloudflare Gateway becomes a Secure Web Gateway and performs L7 filtering to inspect traffic for threats that hide below the surface. Like our DNS filtering and 1.1.1.1 resolver, both features are powered by everything we’ve learned by offering Cloudflare WARP to millions of users globally.

Securing the distributed workforce

Our customers are largely distributed workforces with employees split between corporate offices and their homes. Due to the pandemic, this is their operating environment for the foreseeable future.

The fact that users aren’t located at fixed, known locations (with remote workers allowed by exception) has created challenges for already overworked IT staff:

  1. VPNs are an all-or-nothing approach to providing remote access to internal applications. We address this with Cloudflare Access and our Zero Trust approach to security for internal applications and now SaaS applications as well.
  2. VPNs are slow and expensive. However, backhauling traffic to a centralized security boundary has been the primary approach to enforcing corporate content and security policies to protect roaming users. Cloudflare Gateway was created to tackle this problem for our customers.

Until today, Cloudflare Gateway has provided security for our customers through DNS filtering. While this provides a level of security and content control that’s application-agnostic, it still leaves our customers with a few challenges:

  1. Customers need to register the source IP address of all locations that send DNS queries to Gateway, so their organization’s traffic can be identified for policy enforcement. This is tedious at best, if not intractable for larger organizations with hundreds of locations.
  2. DNS policies are relatively coarse, with enforcement performed with an all-or-nothing approach per domain. Organizations lack the ability to, for example, allow access to a cloud storage provider but block the download of harmful files from known-malicious URLs.
  3. Organizations that register IP addresses frequently use Network Address Translation (NAT) traffic in order to share public IP addresses across many users. This results in a loss of visibility into DNS activity logs at the individual user level. So while IT security admins can see that a malicious domain was blocked, they must leverage additional forensic tools to track down a potentially compromised device.

Starting today, we are taking Cloudflare Gateway beyond a secure DNS filtering solution by pairing the Cloudflare for Teams client with a cloud L7 firewall. Now our customers can toss out another hardware appliance in their centralized security boundary and provide enterprise-level security for their users directly from the Cloudflare edge.

Protecting users and preventing corporate data loss

DNS filtering provides a baseline level of security across entire systems and even networks, since it’s leveraged by all applications for Internet communications. However, application-specific protection offers granular policy enforcement and visibility into whether traffic should be classified as malicious.

Today we’re excited to extend the protection we offer through DNS filtering by adding an L7 firewall that allows our customers to apply security and content policies to HTTP traffic. This provides administrators with a better tool to protect users through granular controls within HTTP sessions, and with visibility into policy enforcement. Just as importantly, it also gives our customers greater control over where their data resides. By building policies, customers can specify whether to allow or block a request based on file type, on whether the request was to upload or download a file, or on whether the destination is an approved cloud storage provider for the organization.

Enterprises protect their users’ Internet traffic wherever they are by connecting to Cloudflare with the Cloudflare for Teams client. This client provides a fast, secure connection to the Cloudflare data center nearest them, and it relies on the same Cloudflare WARP application millions of users connect through globally. Because the client uses the same WARP application under the hood, enterprises can be sure it has been tested at scale to provide security without compromising on performance. Cloudflare WARP optimizes network performance by leveraging WireGuard for the connection to the Cloudflare edge.

The result is a secure, performant connection for enterprise users wherever they are without requiring the backhaul of network traffic to a centralized security boundary. By connecting to Cloudflare Gateway with the Cloudflare for Teams client, enterprise users are protected through filtering policies applied to all outbound Internet traffic–protecting users as they navigate the Internet and preventing the loss of corporate data.

Cloudflare Gateway now supports HTTP traffic filtering based on a variety of criteria including:

Criteria Example
URL, path, and/or query string https://www.myurl.com/path?query
HTTP method GET, POST, etc.
HTTP response code 500
File type and file name myfilename.zip
MIME type application/zip
URL security or content category Malware, phishing, adult themes

To complement DNS filtering policies, IT admins can now create L7 firewall rules to apply granular policies on HTTP traffic.

For example, an admin may want to allow users to navigate to useful parts of Reddit, but block undesirable subreddits.

Cloudflare Gateway now protects teams, wherever they are

Or to prevent data loss, an admin could create a rule that allows users to receive content from popular cloud storage providers but not upload select file types from corporate devices.

Cloudflare Gateway now protects teams, wherever they are

Another admin might want to prevent malicious files from being smuggled in through zip file downloads, so they may decide to configure a rule to block downloads of compressed file types.

Cloudflare Gateway now protects teams, wherever they are

Having used our DNS filtering categories to protect internal users, an admin may want to simply block security threats based on the classification of full URLs. Malware payloads are frequently disseminated from cloud storage and with DNS filtering an admin has to choose whether to allow or deny access to the entire domain for a given storage provider. URL filtering gives admins the ability to filter requests for the exact URLs where malware payloads reside, allowing customers to continue to leverage the usefulness of their chosen storage provider.

Cloudflare Gateway now protects teams, wherever they are

And because all of this is made possible with the Cloudflare for Teams client, distributed workforces with roaming clients receive this protection wherever they are through a secure connection to the Cloudflare data center nearest them.

Cloudflare Gateway now protects teams, wherever they are

We’re excited to protect teams as they browse the Internet by inspecting HTTP traffic, but what about non-HTTP traffic? Later this year, we will extend Cloudflare Gateway by adding support for IP, port, and protocol filtering with a cloud L4 firewall. This will allow administrators to apply rules to all Internet-bound traffic, like rules that allow outbound SSH, or rules that determine whether to send HTTP traffic arriving on a non-standard port to the L7 firewall for HTTP inspection.

At launch, Cloudflare Gateway will allow administrators to create policies that filter DNS and HTTP traffic across all users in an organization. This creates a great baseline for security. However, exceptions are part of reality: a one-size-fits-all approach to content and security policy enforcement rarely matches the specific needs of all users.

To address this, we’re working on supporting rules based on user and group identity by integrating Cloudflare Access with a customer’s existing identity provider. This will let administrators create granular rules that also leverage context around the user, such as:

  • Deny access to social media to all users. But if John Doe is in the marketing group, allow him to access these sites in order to perform his job role.
  • Only allow Jane Doe to connect to specific SaaS applications through Cloudflare Gateway, or a certain device posture.

The need for policy enforcement and logging visibility based on identity arises from the reality that users aren’t tied to fixed, known workplaces. We meet that need by integrating identity and protecting users wherever they are with the Cloudflare for Teams client.

What’s next

People do not start businesses to deal with the minutiae of information technology and security. They have a vision and a product or service they want to get out in the world, and we want to get them back to doing that. We can help eliminate the hard parts around implementing advanced security tools that are usually reserved for larger, more sophisticated organizations, and we want to make them available to teams regardless of size.

The launch of both the Cloudflare for Teams client and L7 firewall lays the foundation for an advanced Secure Web Gateway with integrations including anti-virus scanning, CASB, and remote browser isolation—all performed at the Cloudflare edge. We’re excited to share this glimpse of the future our team has built—and we’re just getting started.

Get started now

All of these new capabilities are ready for you to use today. The L7 firewall is available in Gateway standalone, Teams Standard, and Teams Enterprise plans. You can get started by signing up for a Gateway account and following the onboarding directions.

Zero Trust For Everyone

Post Syndicated from Abe Carryl original https://blog.cloudflare.com/teams-plans/

Zero Trust For Everyone

We launched Cloudflare for Teams to make Zero Trust security accessible for all organizations, regardless of size, scale, or resources. Starting today, we are excited to take another step on this journey by announcing our new Teams plans, and more specifically, our Cloudflare for Teams Free plan, which protects up to 50 users at no cost. To get started, sign up today.

If you’re interested in how and why we’re doing this, keep scrolling.

Our Approach to Zero Trust

Cloudflare Access is one-half of Cloudflare for Teams – a Zero Trust solution that secures inbound connections to your protected applications. Cloudflare Access works like a bouncer, checking identity at the door to all of your applications.

The other half of Cloudflare for Teams is Cloudflare Gateway which, as our clever name implies, is a Secure Web Gateway protecting all of your users’ outbound connections to the Internet. To continue with this analogy, Cloudflare Gateway is your organization’s bodyguard, securing your users as they navigate the Internet.

Together, these two solutions provide a powerful, single dashboard to protect your users, networks, and applications from malicious actors.

Zero Trust For Everyone

A Mission-Driven Solution

At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. That means a better Internet for everyone, regardless of size, scale, or resources. With Cloudflare for Teams, our part in this mission is to keep your team members secure from unknown threats and your applications safe from attack, so that your team can focus on your business.

Earlier this year, shortly after we launched Cloudflare for Teams, organizations suddenly had to change the way they worked. Users left offices, and the security provided by those offices, to work from home. This accelerated the pace of IT transformation from years to days, or even hours.

To alleviate that burden, we provided Cloudflare for Teams for everyone at no cost, and with no restrictions until September 1, 2020. We also offered free one-on-one onboarding to make adoption seamless, and used those sessions to improve the product for our current users as well.

Moving forward, users will continue to work from home, and applications will continue to move away from managed data centers. While our initial free program is no longer available, our team wanted to find a new way to continue helping organizations of any size adjust to this new security model that seems to be here to stay.

The New Free Plan

Today, we are launching the Cloudflare for Teams Free plan, which brings the features of enterprise Zero Trust products and Secure Web Gateways to small teams as well.

Cloudflare for Teams Free offers robust Zero Trust security features for both internal and SaaS applications, and supports integration with a myriad of social and enterprise identity providers like AzureAD or Github. Our Free plan also includes DNS content and security filtering for multiple network locations, complete with 24 hour log retention. By offering Cloudflare for Teams Free, our goal is to empower you to take your first step on a journey to Zero Trust with us.

Zero Trust For Everyone

What You Can Do with Teams Free

With up to 50 seats of Access and Gateway, we’ve seen that the possibilities are endless. In fact, here are some of our favorite ways users are already getting the most out of Cloudflare for Teams Free today.

  • Collaborate on your startup. Build your product without worrying about security. Use Access to protect your development environment.
  • Secure your home Wi-Fi network. Point your home Wi-Fi router’s traffic to Gateway, and set up simple filtering rules to block malware and phishing attacks.
  • Protect the backend of your personal website. Lock down your WordPress admin panel pages, and invite collaborators to work on your blog by using Access’ one-time-pin feature.
  • Safeguard a guest Wi-Fi network. Shield a retail location with Gateway by enforcing your Acceptable Use Policy on your network.

Standalone and Standard

In addition to our new Cloudflare for Teams Free plan, we’re also making it easier to continue your Zero Trust journey by offering enhanced features in our standalone Cloudflare Access or Cloudflare Gateway plans.

With standalone Access, you can easily scale up or down with as many users as you need at any time for $3 per user.

Similarly, with Gateway standalone, you can safely and securely deploy DNS or HTTP security controls from 1 up to 20 different locations for $5 per user without compromising on reliability or performance.

Last but not least, we’re excited to finally give users a way to bundle with Teams Standard, which brings together everything from Access and Gateway under one simple plan at $7 per user.

Getting Started

To get started, just navigate to our sign-up page and create an account. If you already have an active account, you can head straight to the Cloudflare for Teams dashboard, where you’ll be dropped directly into our self-guided onboarding flow. From here, you’re just three steps away from deploying Access or Gateway but, in our opinion, you can’t go wrong kicking off with either.

What Happens When The Whole World Goes Remote? Not To Worry, We Were Built For This

Post Syndicated from Dina Aluzri original https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-happens-when-the-whole-world-goes-remote-not-to-worry-we-were-built-for-this/

What Happens When The Whole World Goes Remote? Not To Worry, We Were Built For This

What Happens When The Whole World Goes Remote? Not To Worry, We Were Built For This

In March, governments all over the world issued stay-at-home orders, causing a mass migration to teleworking. Alongside many of our partners, Cloudflare launched free products and services supported by onboarding sessions to help our clients secure and accelerate their remote work environments. Over the past few months, a dedicated team of specialists met with hundreds of organizations – from tiny startups, to massive corporations – to help them extend better security and performance to a suddenly-remote workforce.

Most companies we heard from had a VPN in place, but it wasn’t set up to accommodate a full-on remote work environment. When employees began working from home, they found that the VPN was getting overloaded with requests, causing performance lags.

While many organizations had bought more VPN licenses to allow employees to connect to their tools, they found that just having licenses wasn’t enough: they needed to reduce the amount of traffic flowing through their VPN by taking select applications off of the private network.

We Were Built For This

My name is Dina and I am a Customer Success Manager (CSM) in our San Francisco office. I am responsible for ensuring the success of Cloudflare’s Enterprise customers and managing all of their post-sales experience. As CSMs, we bring strong product knowledge, best practices and a high degree of empathy to ensure our customers’ satisfaction with Cloudflare’s services. This is driven through delivering the value of our products and services to our customer’s business via regular check-ins and quarterly reviews.

One customer I work with, a service that connects physicians to patients over the Internet, was forced to respond to a requirement for the entire company to work-from-home within 48 hours. This company could not move their entire workforce to a VPN without overwhelming their appliances and IT Help Desk. Any interruption to business continuity could threaten the provider’s ability to deliver services to customers during a time of peak demand, and especially during a time when doctors’ office environments felt unsafe.

Cloudflare Access had been a product of interest for my customer for a while now, and the adoption of the product couldn’t have come at a better time. As an enterprise customer, they enlisted the help of our subject matter experts to troubleshoot the sudden WFH situation. With the help of the Cloudflare CSM, solution engineers, and product managers, the organization was able to migrate internally-hosted applications to Cloudflare Access in less than 15 minutes.

Hundreds of team members began using Cloudflare Access within the next 24 hours. We were able to operationalize a critical call center app without a VPN at the click of a button. In the words of the customer, “…we should have done this a long time ago. It’s beautiful, this is perfect.” Virtually overnight, over 700 users were immediately signed on, and more are being added daily as the company grows and working from home remains a necessity. It could even become a permanent way of working for many organizations around the world.

It’s More Than A Solution

At Cloudflare, our customers are our top priority. Our constant innovation and transparency maintain our customers’ trust and support. This particular telemedicine company has been a Cloudflare customer for 5 years, not only because of the technology, but because of those exact priorities we uphold.

The customer’s journey follows a pattern I see often in my role: this customer initially used Cloudflare for Infrastructure products to protect external sites – their website and customer-facing applications. Because they leverage our solutions in this way, the domain of their call center app was already IP whitelisted on Cloudflare via Zone lockdown, one of our Enterprise features. With their deep knowledge and experience with Cloudflare, they could easily apply the same benefits they were getting from WAF and CDN to their internal employees.

Throughout their tenure with Cloudflare, this customer has constantly interacted with us through events (when they were in-person 😔), webinars, email communication, feature request reviews, and frequent catch-ups over the phone. These conversations provided regular opportunities for the customer to expand their knowledge of Cloudflare, build trust, and grow their usage of Cloudflare’s services. The customer first learned about our Access technology at Cloudflare Connect in NYC last year.

The event proved to be the perfect forum for them to interact with the Cloudflare community, discover new technology, and discuss and brainstorm with onsite technical experts. The customer had been using Cloudflare for our core security and performance services for a long time. They had been receiving value from our other services, and when COVID-19 hit, Cloudflare was there as a trusted advisor and partner to easily tackle this inevitable situation. Everything they’ve learned through their constant interaction with the Cloudflare team, and at Cloudflare events, finally came to fruition.

I tell this customer’s story to raise awareness and encourage our customers – and really anyone interested – to stay up to date with the constant innovation here at Cloudflare. We continue to host and facilitate events and webinars. This allows you, as our customer, to learn and derive value from our technology, so your business is further protected and optimized.  After a webinar and one meeting with us, you can transition your whole work environment to virtual.

Listen in on webinars, attend events, and read up on our blog, developer docs, and support pages, so you can easily call us, and with a click of a button turn on the next feature that will enhance your site and work experience.

Interested in Learning More?

Join Cloudflare’s Product Managers each month to hear the latest highlights, including this month’s feature on Cloudflare for Teams and Cloudflare Workers.  

Need help with your team working remotely? Cloudflare for Teams is free to try for up to 50 users. Learn more.

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.

How Argo Tunnel engineering uses Argo Tunnel

Post Syndicated from Chung-Ting Huang original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-argo-tunnel-engineering-uses-argo-tunnel/

How Argo Tunnel engineering uses Argo Tunnel

Whether you are managing a fleet of machines or sharing a private site from your localhost, Argo Tunnel is here to help. On the Argo Tunnel team we help make origins accessible from the Internet in a secure and seamless manner. We also care deeply about productivity and developer experience for the team, so naturally we want to make sure we have a development environment that is reliable, easy to set up and fast to iterate on.

A brief history of our development environment (dev-stack)

Docker compose

When our development team was still small, we used a docker-compose file to orchestrate the services needed to develop Argo Tunnel. There was no native support for hot reload, so every time an engineer made a change, they had to restart their dev-stack.

We could hack around it to hot reload with docker-compose, but when that failed, we had to waste time debugging the internals of Docker. As the team grew, we realized we needed to invest in improving our dev stack.

At the same time Cloudflare was in the process of migrating from Marathon to kubernetes (k8s). We set out to find a tool that could detect changes in source code and automatically upgrade pods with new images.

Skaffold + Minikube

Initially Skaffold seemed to match the criteria. It watches for change in source code, builds new images and deploys applications onto any k8s. Following Skaffold’s tutorial, we picked minikube as the local k8s, but together they didn’t meet our expectations. Port forwarding wasn’t stable, we got frequent connections refused or timeout.

In addition, iteration time didn’t improve, because spinning up minikube takes a long time and it doesn’t use the host’s docker registry and so it can’t take advantage of caching. At this point we considered reverting back to using docker compose, but the k8s ecosystem is booming, so we did some more research.

Tilt + Docker for mac k8s

Eventually we found a great blog post from Tilt comparing different options for local k8s, and they seem to be solving the exact problem we are having. Tilt is a tool that makes local development on k8s easier. It detects changes in local sources and updates your deployment accordingly.

In addition, it supports live updates without having to rebuild containers, a process that used to take around 20 minutes. With live updates, we can copy the newest source into the container, run cargo build within the container, and restart the service without building a new image. Following Tilt’s blog post, we switched to Docker for Mac’s built-in k8s. Combining Tilt and Docker for Mac k8s, we finally have a development environment that meets our needs.

Rust services that could take 20 minutes to rebuild now take less than a minute.

Collaborating with a distributed team

We reached a much happier state with our dev-stack, but one problem remained: we needed a way to share it. As our teams became distributed with people in Austin, Lisbon and Seattle, we needed better ways to help each other.

One day, I was helping our newest member understand an error observed in cloudflared, Argo Tunnel’s command line interface (CLI) client. I knew the error could either originate from the backend service or a mock API gateway service, but I couldn’t tell for sure without looking at logs.

To get them, I had to ask our new teammate to manually send me the logs of the two services. By the time I discovered the source of the error, reviewed the deployment manifest, and determined the error was caused by a secret set as an empty string, two full hours had elapsed!

I could have solved this in minutes if I had remote access to her development environment. That’s exactly what Argo Tunnel can do! Argo Tunnel provides remote access to development environments by creating secure outbound-only connections to Cloudflare’s edge network from a resource exposing it to the Internet. That model helps protect servers and resources from being vulnerable to attack by an exposed IP address.

I can use Argo Tunnel to expose a remote dev environment, but the information stored is sensitive. Once exposed, we needed a way to prevent users from reaching it unless they are an authenticated member of my team. Cloudflare Access solves that challenge. Access sits in front of the hostname powered by Argo Tunnel and checks for identity on every request. I can combine both services to share the dev-stack details with the rest of the team in a secure deployment.

The built-in k8s dashboard gives a great overview of the dev-stack, with the list of pods, deployments, services, config maps, secrets, etc. It also allows us to inspect pod logs and exec into a container. By default, it is secured by a token that changes every time the service restarts. To avoid the hassle of distributing the service token to everyone on the team, we wrote a simple reverse proxy that injects the service token in the authorization header before forwarding requests to the dashboard service.

Then we run Argo Tunnel as a sidecar to this reverse proxy, so it is accessible from the Internet. Finally, to make sure no random person can see our dashboard, we put an Access policy that only allows team members to access the hostname.

The request flow is eyeball -> Access -> Argo Tunnel -> reverse proxy -> dashboard service

How Argo Tunnel engineering uses Argo Tunnel

Working example

Your team can use the same model to develop remotely. Here’s how to get started.

  1. Start a local k8s cluster. https://docs.tilt.dev/choosing_clusters.html offers great advice in choosing a local cluster based on your OS and experience with k8s
How Argo Tunnel engineering uses Argo Tunnel

2. Enable dashboard service:

How Argo Tunnel engineering uses Argo Tunnel

3. Create a reverse proxy that will inject the service token of the kubernetes-dashboard service account in the Authorization header before forwarding requests to kubernetes dashboard service

package main
 
import (
   "crypto/tls"
   "fmt"
   "net/http"
   "net/http/httputil"
   "net/url"
   "os"
)
 
func main() {
   config, err := loadConfigFromEnv()
   if err != nil {
       panic(err)
   }
   reverseProxy := httputil.NewSingleHostReverseProxy(config.proxyURL)
   // The default Director builds the request URL. We want our custom Director to add Authorization, in
   // addition to building the URL
   singleHostDirector := reverseProxy.Director
   reverseProxy.Director = func(r *http.Request) {
       singleHostDirector(r)
       r.Header.Add("Authorization", fmt.Sprintf("Bearer %s", config.token))
       fmt.Println("request header", r.Header)
       fmt.Println("request host", r.Host)
       fmt.Println("request ULR", r.URL)
   }
   reverseProxy.Transport = &http.Transport{
       TLSClientConfig: &tls.Config{
           InsecureSkipVerify: true,
       },
   }
   server := http.Server{
       Addr:    config.listenAddr,
       Handler: reverseProxy,
   }
   server.ListenAndServe()
}
 
type config struct {
   listenAddr string
   proxyURL   *url.URL
   token      string
}
 
func loadConfigFromEnv() (*config, error) {
   listenAddr, err := requireEnv("LISTEN_ADDRESS")
   if err != nil {
       return nil, err
   }
   proxyURLStr, err := requireEnv("DASHBOARD_PROXY_URL")
   if err != nil {
       return nil, err
   }
   proxyURL, err := url.Parse(proxyURLStr)
   if err != nil {
       return nil, err
   }
   token, err := requireEnv("DASHBOARD_TOKEN")
   if err != nil {
       return nil, err
   }
   return &config{
       listenAddr: listenAddr,
       proxyURL:   proxyURL,
       token:      token,
   }, nil
}
 
func requireEnv(key string) (string, error) {
   result := os.Getenv(key)
   if result == "" {
       return "", fmt.Errorf("%v not provided", key)
   }
   return result, nil
}

4. Create an Argo Tunnel sidecar to expose this reverse proxy

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
 name: dashboard-auth-proxy
 namespace: kubernetes-dashboard
 labels:
   app: dashboard-auth-proxy
spec:
 replicas: 1
 selector:
   matchLabels:
     app: dashboard-auth-proxy
 template:
   metadata:
     labels:
       app: dashboard-auth-proxy
   spec:
     containers:
       - name: dashboard-tunnel
         # Image from https://hub.docker.com/r/cloudflare/cloudflared
         image: cloudflare/cloudflared:2020.8.0
         command: ["cloudflared", "tunnel"]
         ports:
           - containerPort: 5000
         env:
           - name: TUNNEL_URL
             value: "http://localhost:8000"
           - name: NO_AUTOUPDATE
             value: "true"
           - name: TUNNEL_METRICS
             value: "localhost:5000"
       # dashboard-proxy is a proxy that injects the dashboard token into Authorization header before forwarding
       # the request to dashboard_proxy service
       - name: dashboard-auth-proxy
         image: dashboard-auth-proxy
         ports:
           - containerPort: 8000
         env:
           - name: LISTEN_ADDRESS
             value: localhost:8000
           - name: DASHBOARD_PROXY_URL
             value: https://kubernetes-dashboard
           - name: DASHBOARD_TOKEN
             valueFrom:
               secretKeyRef:
                 name: ${TOKEN_NAME}
                 key: token

5. Find out the URL to access your dashboard from Tilt’s UI

How Argo Tunnel engineering uses Argo Tunnel

6. Share the URL with your collaborators so they can access your dashboard anywhere they are through the tunnel!

How Argo Tunnel engineering uses Argo Tunnel

You can find the source code for the example in https://github.com/cloudflare/argo-tunnel-examples/tree/master/sharing-k8s-dashboard

If this sounds like a team you want to be on, we are hiring!