Hello I’ve been using cloudflare to get remote access for the couple apps I selfhost, but lately I’ve been hearing about the wonders of tailscale.
It seems that the free tier is enough for my use. Which would be a safe option to have remote access for my 3D printer? Also how are both in terms of privacy?
I apologize, I misread the chain of comments. Your explanation is perfectly adequate for someone who has a basic grasp on networking and VPN and tunnels and encryption.
I would just like to add that if your endpoints communicate via an encrypted transport (HTTPS, SSH, etc) then doesn’t matter if cloudflare tries to inspect your packets. There would be 2 layers of encryption while traversing the public web, then 1 layer when traversing CF’s network.
And to some, packet inspection is not a downside since they can offer more protection - but that is totally up to your attack vector tollerence
Thats not how Cloudflare tunnels work. Your data is encrypted to Cloudflare’s network then decrypted. Then they encrypt a second connection between their server and yours via a connector service running in your server. It does matter if CF tries to inspect your packets because there is one layer of encryption over the internet, then briefly zero layers of encryption, then one layer of encryption while traversing CF network. I’m not aware of any product that Cloudflare provides that allows for them to tunnel your HTTPS traffic without them being able to decrypt your data to plain text.
hmm, I’m not sure I agree - or perhaps I didn’t explain myself well previously and caused confusion between us.
Yes I agree with you in your description of how cloudflare encrypts -> decrypts -> encrypts; they are allowing you to ride over their network. If you remove cloudflare from the picture entirely, then you just have the internet facing server.
What I’m saying is, if the client and endpoint (server) talk in an encrypted protocol, then cloudflare cannot MiTM the data, only the IP headers. This is similar if you were to connect to any ol’ website over an ISP’s network. If your session is not HTTPS, then your application data can be read. You can have encrypted sessions inside of CF tunnel-network-tunnel.
If your services support encryption, great. But you can also expose a wireguard endpoint so you have the following
wg client --(tunnel to CF)–> CF network --(tunnel to your server)–> wireguard server
the real advantage to CF tunnel is hiding your IP from the public internet, not poking any holes in your firewall for ingress traffic, and cloudflare can apply firewall rules to those clients trying to reach your server by DNS hostname.
You’re explaining yourself fine, you’re just mistaken about the way Cloudflare tunnels work. You’re confusing concepts between a L4 proxy and a L7 proxy.
This is not the case. You are under the mistaken impression that CF tunnels work like a L4 tunnel, proxying a TCP stream from client to server, allowing you to maintain an encrypted TLS session from client to server. That would be closer to what Tailscale Funnel does (Which I’d advocate for). CF tunnels do not work this way. Cf tunnels work more like a L7 proxy. Your client and your server never talk, so there is no encrypted protocol between them. There is only encryption between you and Cloudflare, and then Cloudflare and your backend server. Cloudflare can and does MitM the data AND the IP headers.
You cannot establish an HTTPS connection with your application from your client. You establish an HTTPS connection with Cloudflare, which gives them plaintext access to all the data you send through them.
To be clear, no you can’t. This is your misunderstanding. At least, you can’t with Cloudflare tunnels. Cloudflare may offer a TCP proxy service, which is what you’re confusing CF tunnels with, if you sign up for an enterprise plan, but you don’t get that functionality in their free plan which OP, and self hosters in general would be using.
thanks for the masterclass in CF tunnels.
I am ready to accept everything you’ve said but there is the SSH case that keeps tripping me up. For reference, here is the CF docs on Connecting SSH through CF Tunnels.
Can you help me clear up the misunderstanding here? From the docs it appears you can create a SSH key pair on a client and then copy the public key to the server. It does not appear that the docs state you need to share those keys with CF, so I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that my session will be encrypted with my private key (on client) and public key (on server).
Again, what you said appears to make sense, perhaps SSH is the only edge case that is implemented differently?