Content delivery network and Web security company CloudFlare has made a name for itself by fending off denial-of-service attacks against its customers large and small. Today, it's launching a new service aimed at winning over the most paranoid of corporate customers. The service is a first step toward doing for network security what Amazon Web Services and other public cloud services have done for application services—replacing on-premises hardware with virtualized services spread across the Internet.
Called Keyless SSL, the new service allows organizations to use CloudFlare’s network of 28 data centers around the world to defend against distributed denial of service attacks on their websites without having to turn over private encryption keys. Keyless SSL breaks the encryption “handshake” at the beginning of a Transport Layer Security (TLS) Web session, passing part of the data back to the organization’s data center for encryption. It then negotiates the session with the returned data and acts as a gateway for authenticated sessions—while still being able to screen out malicious traffic such as denial of service attacks.
In an interview with Ars, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince said that the technology behind Keyless SSL could help security-minded organizations embrace other cloud services while keeping a tighter rein on them. “If you decide you’re going to use cloud services today, how you set policy across all of these is impossible," he said. "Now that we can do this, fast forward a year, and we can do things like data loss prevention, intrusion detection… all these things are just bytes in the stream, and we’re already looking at them.”
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