this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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What's wrong with using cloudflared? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I read a comment on here some time ago where the person said they were using cloudflared to expose some of their self-hosted stuff to the Internet so they can access it remotely.

I am currently using it to expose my RSS feed reader, and it works out fine. I also like the simplicity of Cloudflare's other offerings.

Any thoughts on why cloudflared is not a good idea? What alternatives would you suggest? How easy/difficult are they to setup?

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[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 70 points 10 months ago (10 children)

I think concerns come in two flavours:

  1. Privacy/security: Cloudflare terminates HTTPS, which means they decrypt your data on their side (e.g. browser to cloudflare section) then re-encrypt for the second part (cloudflare to server). They can therefore read your traffic, including passwords. Depending on your threat model, this might be a concern or it might not. A counterpoint is that Cloudflare helps protect your service from bad actors, so it could be seen to increase security.
  2. Cloudflare is centralised. The sidebar of this community states "A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.", and Cloudflare is for sure a service you don't control, and arguably you're locked into it if you can't access your stuff without it. Some people think Coudflare goes against the ethos of self-hosting.

With that said, you'll find several large lemmy instances (and many small ones) use cloudflare. While you'll easily find people against its use, you'll find many more people in the self-hosted community using it because it's (typically) free and it works. If you want to use it, and you're ok with the above, then go ahead.

[–] keyez@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I have a cloudflare tunnel setup for 1 service in my homelab and have it connecting to my reverse proxy so the data between cloudflare and my backend is encrypted separately. I get no malformed requests and no issues from cloudflare, even remote public IP data in the headers.

Everyone mentions this as an issue, and I am sure doing the default of pointing cloudflared at a http local service but it's not the ONLY option.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm not quite sure I get what you're getting at. If you're using Cloudflare (for more than just a nameserver), then the client's browser is connecting to Cloudflare via a Cloudflare SSL certificate. Any password (or other data) submitted will be readable by Cloudflare because the encryption is only between the browser and Cloudflare. They then connect to your reverse proxy, which might have SSL or it might be unencrypted. That's a second jump done by re-encrypting the data.

How does the reverse proxy help, when the browser is connecting to Cloudflare not to the reverse proxy?

[–] keyez@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Fair, I was more thinking from the server side not the client side where cloudflare certs are the ones seen first.

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