Tag Archives: Regional Services

One-click ISO 27001 certified deployment of Regional Services in the EU

Post Syndicated from Achiel van der Mandele original https://blog.cloudflare.com/one-click-iso-27001-deployment/

One-click ISO 27001 certified deployment of Regional Services in the EU

One-click ISO 27001 certified deployment of Regional Services in the EU

Today, we’re very happy to announce the general availability of a new region for Regional Services that allows you to limit your traffic to only ISO 27001 certified data centers inside the EU. This helps customers that have very strict requirements surrounding which data centers are allowed to decrypt and service traffic. Enabling this feature is a one-click operation right on the Cloudflare dashboard.

Regional Services – a recap

In 2020, we saw an increase in prospects asking about data localization. Specifically, increased regulatory pressure limited them from using vendors that operated at global scale. We launched Regional Services, a new way for customers to use the Cloudflare network. With Regional Services, we put customers back in control over which data centers are used to service traffic. Regional Services operates by limiting exactly which data centers are used to decrypt and service HTTPS traffic. For example, a customer may want to use only data centers inside the European Union to service traffic. Regional Services operates by leveraging our global network for DDoS protection but only decrypting traffic and applying Layer 7 products inside data centers that are located inside the European Union.

We later followed up with the Data Localization Suite and additional regions: India, Singapore and Japan.

With Regional Services, customers get the best of both worlds: we empower them to use our global network for volumetric DDoS protection whilst limiting where traffic is serviced. We do that by accepting the raw TCP connection at the closest data center but forwarding it on to a data center in-region for decryption. That means that only machines of the customer’s choosing actually see the raw HTTP request, which could contain sensitive data such as a customer’s bank account or medical information.

A new region and a new UI

Traditionally we’ve seen requests for data localization largely center around countries or geographic areas. Many types of regulations require companies to make promises about working only with vendors that are capable of restricting where their traffic is serviced geographically. Organizations can have many reasons for being limited in their choices, but they generally fall into two buckets: compliance and contractual commitments.

More recently, we are seeing that more and more companies are asking about security requirements. An often asked question about security in IT is: how do you ensure that something is safe? For instance, for a data center you might be wondering how physical access is managed. Or how often security policies are reviewed and updated. This is where certifications come in. A common certification in IT is the ISO 27001 certification:

Per the ISO.org:

“ISO/IEC 27001 is the world’s best-known standard for information security management systems (ISMS) and their requirements. Additional best practice in data protection and cyber resilience are covered by more than a dozen standards in the ISO/IEC 27000 family. Together, they enable organizations of all sectors and sizes to manage the security of assets such as financial information, intellectual property, employee data and information entrusted by third parties.”

In short, ISO 27001 is a certification that a data center can achieve that ensures that they maintain a set of security standards to keep the data center secure. With the new Regional Services region, HTTPS traffic will only be decrypted in data centers that hold the ISO 27001 certification. Products such as WAF, Bot Management and Workers will only be applied in those relevant data centers.

The other update we’re excited to announce is a brand new User Interface for configuring the Data Localization Suite. The previous UI was limited in that customers had to preconfigure a region for an entire zone: you couldn’t mix and match regions. The new UI allows you to do just that: each individual hostname can be configured for a different region, directly on the DNS tab:

One-click ISO 27001 certified deployment of Regional Services in the EU

Configuring a region for a particular hostname is now just a single click away. Changes take effect within seconds, making this the easiest way to configure data localization yet. For customers using the Metadata Boundary, we’ve also launched a self-serve UI that allows you to configure where logs flow:

One-click ISO 27001 certified deployment of Regional Services in the EU

We’re excited about these new updates that give customers more flexibility in choosing which of Cloudflare’s data centers to use as well as making it easier than ever to configure them. The new region and existing regions are now a one-click configuration option right from the dashboard. As always, we love getting feedback, especially on what new regions you’d like to see us add in the future. In the meantime, if you’re interested in using the Data Localization Suite, please reach out to your account team.

A new, configurable and scalable version of Geo Key Manager, now available in Closed Beta

Post Syndicated from Dina Kozlov original https://blog.cloudflare.com/configurable-and-scalable-geo-key-manager-closed-beta/

A new, configurable and scalable version of Geo Key Manager, now available in Closed Beta

A new, configurable and scalable version of Geo Key Manager, now available in Closed Beta

Today, traffic on the Internet stays encrypted through the use of public and private keys that encrypt the data as it’s being transmitted. Cloudflare helps secure millions of websites by managing the encryption keys that keep this data protected. To provide lightning fast services, Cloudflare stores these keys on our fleet of data centers that spans more than 150 countries. However, some compliance regulations require that private keys are only stored in specific geographic locations.

In 2017, we introduced Geo Key Manager, a product that allows customers to store and manage the encryption keys for their domains in different geographic locations so that compliance regulations are met and that data remains secure. We launched the product a few months before General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect and built it to support three regions: the US, the European Union (EU), and a set of our top tier data centers that employ the highest security measures. Since then, GDPR-like laws have quickly expanded and now, more than 15 countries have comparable data protection laws or regulations that include restrictions on data transfer across and/or data localization within a certain boundary.

At Cloudflare, we like to be prepared for the future. We want to give our customers tools that allow them to maintain compliance in this ever-changing environment. That’s why we’re excited to announce a new version of Geo Key Manager — one that allows customers to define boundaries by country, ”only store my private keys in India”, by a region ”only store my private keys in the European Union”, or by a standard, such as “only store my private keys in FIPS compliant data centers” — now available in Closed Beta, sign up here!

Learnings from Geo Key Manager v1

Geo Key Manager has been around for a few years now, and we’ve used this time to gather feedback from our customers. As the demand for a more flexible system grew, we decided to go back to the drawing board and create a new version of Geo Key Manager that would better meet our customers’ needs.

We initially launched Geo Key Manager with support for US, EU, and Highest Security Data centers. Those regions were sufficient at the time, but customers wrestling with data localization obligations in other jurisdictions need more flexibility when it comes to selecting countries and regions. Some customers want to be able to set restrictions to maintain their private keys in one country, some want the keys stored everywhere except in certain countries, and some may want to mix and match rules and say “store them in X and Y, but not in Z”. What we learned from our customers is that they need flexibility, something that will allow them to keep up with the ever-changing rules and policies — and that’s what we set out to build out.

The next issue we faced was scalability.  When we built the initial regions, we included a hard-coded list of data centers that met our criteria for the US, EU, “high security” data center regions.  However, this list was static because the underlying cryptography did not support dynamic changes to our list of data centers. In order to distribute private keys to new data centers that met our criteria, we would have had to completely overhaul the system. In addition to that, our network significantly expands every year, with more than 100 new data centers since the initial launch. That means that any new potential locations that could be used to store private keys are currently not in use, degrading the performance and reliability of customers using this feature.

With our current scale, automation and expansion is a must-have. Our new system needs to dynamically scale every time we onboard or remove a data center from our Network, without any human intervention or large overhaul.

Finally, one of our biggest learnings was that customers make mistakes, such as defining a region that’s so small that availability becomes a concern. Our job is to prevent our customers from making changes that we know will negatively impact them.

Define your own geo-restrictions with the new version of Geo Key Manager

A new, configurable and scalable version of Geo Key Manager, now available in Closed Beta

Cloudflare has significantly grown in the last few years and so has our international customer base. Customers need to keep their traffic regionalized. This region can be as broad as a continent — Asia, for example. Or, it can be a specific country, like Japan.

From our conversations with our customers, we’ve heard that they want to be able to define these regions themselves. This is why today we’re excited to announce that customers will be able to use Geo Key Manager to create what we call “policies”.

A policy can be a single country, defined by two-letter (ISO 3166) country code. It can be a region, such as “EU” for the European Union or Oceania. It can be a mix and match of the two, “country:US or region: EU”.

Our new policy based Geo Key Manager allows you to create allowlist or blocklists of countries and supported regions, giving you control over the boundary in which your private key will be stored. If you’d like to store your private keys globally and omit a few countries, you can do that.

If you would like to store your private keys in the EU and US, you would make the following API call:

curl -X POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/zone_id/custom_certificates" \
     -H "X-Auth-Email: [email protected]" \
     -H "X-Auth-Key: auth-key" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     --data '{"certificate":"certificate","private_key":"private_key","policy":"(country: US) or (region: EU)", "type": "sni_custom"}'

If you would like to store your private keys in the EU, but not in France, here is how you can define that:

curl -X POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/zone_id/custom_certificates" \
     -H "X-Auth-Email: [email protected]" \
     -H "X-Auth-Key: auth-key" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     --data '{"certificate":"certificate","private_key":"private_key","policy": "region: EU and (not country: FR)", "type": "sni_custom"}'

Geo Key Manager can now support more than 30 countries and regions. But that’s not all! The superpower of our Geo Key Manager technology is that it doesn’t actually have to be “geo” based, but instead, it’s attribute based. In the future, we’ll have a policy that will allow our customers to define where their private keys are stored based on a compliance standard like FedRAMP or ISO 27001.

Reliability, resiliency, and redundancy

By giving our customers the remote control for Geo Key Manager, we want to make sure that customers understand the impact of their changes on both redundancy and latency.

On the redundancy side, one of our biggest concerns is allowing customers to choose a region small enough that if a data center is removed for maintenance, for example, then availability is drastically impacted. To protect our customers, we’ve added redundancy restrictions. These prevent our customers from setting regions with too few data centers, ensuring that all the data centers within a policy can offer high availability and redundancy.

Not just that, but in the last few years, we’ve significantly improved the underlying networking that powers Geo Key Manager. For more information on how we did that, keep an eye out for a technical deep dive inside Geo Key Manager.

Performance matters

A new, configurable and scalable version of Geo Key Manager, now available in Closed Beta

With the original regions (US, EU, and Highest Security Data Centers), we learned customers may overlook possible latency impacts that occur when defining the key manager to a certain region. Imagine your keys are stored in the US. For your Asia-based customers, there’s going to be some latency impact for the requests that go around the world. Now, with customers being able to define more granular regions, we want to make sure that before customers make that change, they see the impact of it.

If you’re an E-Commerce platform then performance is always top-of-mind. One thing that we’re working on right now is performance metrics for Geo Key Manager policies both from a regional point of view — “what’s the latency impact for Asia based customers?” and from a global point of view — “for anyone in the world, what is the average impact of this policy?”.

By seeing the latency impact, if you see that the impact is unacceptable, you may want to create a separate domain for your service that’s specific to the region that it’s serving.

Closed Beta, now available!

Interested in trying out the latest version of Geo Key Manager? Fill out this form.

Coming soon!

Geo Key Manager is only available via API at the moment. But, we are working on creating an easy-to-use UI for it, so that customers can easily manage their policies and regions. In addition, we’ll surface performance measurements and warnings when we see any degraded impact in terms of performance or redundancy to ensure that customers are mindful when setting policies.

We’re also excited to extend our Geo Key Manager product beyond custom uploaded certificates. In the future, certificates issued through Advanced Certificate Manager or SSL for SaaS will be allowed to add policy based restrictions for the key storage.

Finally, we’re looking to add more default regions to make the selection process simple for our customers. If you have any regions that you’d like us to support, or just general feedback or feature requests related to Geo Key Manager, make a note of it on the form. We love hearing from our customers!

Regional Services comes to India, Japan and Australia

Post Syndicated from Achiel van der Mandele original https://blog.cloudflare.com/regional-services-comes-to-apac/

Regional Services comes to India, Japan and Australia

This post is also available in Deutsch, Français.

Regional Services comes to India, Japan and Australia

We announced the Data Localization Suite in 2020, when requirements for data localization were already important in the European Union. Since then, we’ve witnessed a growing trend toward localization globally. We are thrilled to expand our coverage to these countries in Asia Pacific, allowing more customers to use Cloudflare by giving them precise control over which parts of the Cloudflare network are able to perform advanced functions like WAF or Bot Management that require inspecting traffic.

Regional Services, a recap

In 2020, we introduced (Regional Services), a new way for customers to use Cloudflare. With Regional Services, customers can limit which data centers actually decrypt and inspect traffic. This helps because certain customers are affected by regulations on where they are allowed to service traffic. Others have agreements with their customers as part of contracts specifying exactly where traffic is allowed to be decrypted and inspected.

As one German bank told us: “We can look at the rules and regulations and debate them all we want. As long as you promise me that no machine outside the European Union will see a decrypted bank account number belonging to one of my customers, we’re happy to use Cloudflare in any capacity”.

Under normal operation, Cloudflare uses its entire network to perform all functions. This is what most customers want: leverage all of Cloudflare’s data centers so that you always service traffic to eyeballs as quickly as possible. Increasingly, we are seeing customers that wish to strictly limit which data centers service their traffic. With Regional Services, customers can use Cloudflare’s network but limit which data centers perform the actual decryption. Products that require decryption, such as WAF, Bot Management and Workers will only be applied within those data centers.

How does Regional Services work?

You might be asking yourself: how does that even work? Doesn’t Cloudflare operate an anycast network? Cloudflare was built from the bottom up to leverage anycast, a routing protocol. All of Cloudflare’s data centers advertise the same IP addresses through Border Gateway Protocol. Whichever data center is closest to you from a network point of view is the one that you’ll hit.

This is great for two reasons. The first is that the closer the data center to you, the faster the reply. The second great benefit is that this comes in very handy when dealing with large DDoS attacks. Volumetric DDoS attacks throw a lot of bogus traffic at you, which overwhelms network capacity. Cloudflare’s anycast network is great at taking on these attacks because they get distributed across the entire network.

Anycast doesn’t respect regional borders, it doesn’t even know about them. Which is why out of the box, Cloudflare can’t guarantee that traffic inside a country will also be serviced there. Although typically you’ll hit a data center inside your country, it’s very possible that your Internet Service Provider will send traffic to a network that might route it to a different country.

Regional Services solves that: when turned on, each data center becomes aware of which region it is operating in. If a user from a country hits a data center that doesn’t match the region that the customer has selected, we simply forward the raw TCP stream in encrypted form. Once it reaches a data center inside the right region, we decrypt and apply all Layer 7 products. This covers products such as CDN, WAF, Bot Management and Workers.

Let’s take an example. A user is in Kerala, India and their Internet Service Provider has determined that the fastest path to one of our data centers is to Colombo, Sri Lanka. In this example, a customer may have selected India as the sole region within which traffic should be serviced. The Colombo data center sees that this traffic is meant for the India region. It does not decrypt, but instead forwards it to the closest data center inside India. There, we decrypt and products such as WAF and Workers are applied as if the traffic had hit the data center directly.

Regional Services comes to India, Japan and Australia

Bringing Regional Services to Asia

Historically, we’ve seen most interest in Regional Services in geographic regions such as the European Union and the Americas. Over the past few years, however, we are seeing a lot of interest from Asia Pacific. Based on customer feedback and analysis on regulations we quickly concluded there were three key regions we needed to support: India, Japan and Australia. We’re proud to say that all three are now generally available for use today.

But we’re not done yet! We realize there are many more customers that require localization to their particular region. We’re looking to add many more in the near future and are working hard to make it easier to support more of them. If you have a region in mind, we’d love to hear it!

India, Japan and Australia are all live today! If you’re interested in using the Data Localization Suite, contact your account team!