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a2ff6eeb0today at 10:43 AM1 replyview on HN

They hold your tls keys and can decrypt all your traffic. They're MITM as a service, by definition. They have to be able to in order to cache and forward appropriately.


Replies

lxgrtoday at 12:57 PM

Also to do DDoS mitigation. Being able to see the HTTP request, at least headers and path, greatly helps with distinguishing attackers from legitimate traffic.

It's a tragedy that there's no standard to allow partial decryption/nested encryption in HTTP, which would allow intermediate proxies like Cloudflare to e.g. only validate a first-level authentication token and rate-limit access to a given endpoint, but not decrypt the actual request body, backend authentication token, or response.

Also desperately missing: Authenticated static file caching (think: cdn.foo.com serves files authenticated/signed by foo.com). Subresource integrity only works for HTML use cases and is clearly not ergonomic enough to make a difference.