The recent incident of ‘cloud bleed’ of the now infamous Cloudflare ran chills down the spine of users of this service. The personal details of users were revealed, which is a major breach of security. Tavis Ormandy, Google’s security researcher, recently exposed that Cloudflare was leaking sensitive information such as HTTP cookies, authentication tokens etc which revealed private messages, passwords and so on from the affected websites.
The reason for this incident is said to be a memory leak. A memory leak occurs when a program incorrectly manages memory allocations. This leaked data was then being cached by search engines making leaked sensitive data widely available across the globe. Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) and web security service provider. Cloudflare’s CTO, John Graham-Cumming has stated that 1 in every 3,300,000 HTTP requests i.e 0.00003% of requests resulted in memory leakage. Some of the websites using Cloudflare’s services include digitalocean.com, thepiratebay.org, codepen.io etc
“CloudBleed” is a bug which causes the exposure of sensitive information on websites hosted on Cloudflare. It is a buffer overflow bug on Cloudflare services that made some HTML pages hosted behind the company’s CDN respond to page requests with random bits of data, thus exposing private data of the website users. . It has been revealed that the problem was related to its HTML parser and affected three security features: email obfuscation, Server-side Excludes and Automatic HTTPS Rewrites.
This incidence of data leakage has affected the general public in various ways. If the website was hosted on Cloudflare, user information could have flown between the back-end servers and end-users through Cloudfalre’s proxies. In order to avoid such incidences in the impending future, use of two-step authentication such as a password as well as a one-time password (OTP) could be implemented.
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