Origin download fail
Larger certificates consume more bandwidth at your origin (which, unlike CloudFlare, may bill you for marginal bandwidth consumption). In this deployment scenario the number of certificates required is a non-trivial fraction of the the number of hostnames you wish to protect (not to mention you may not even be allowed to do so on shared hosts).īeyond provisioning efforts, placing too many SANs on a single certificate can significantly increase the size of the certificate. The alternative-placing just one SAN on each certificate and using Server Name Indication (SNI) extension to lazy load the correct certificate-can easily get out of hand. If your origin server handles traffic for more than a few hostnames, it can get unwieldy to place a long list of SANs on each certificate request. Regardless of the user interface chosen, the potentially complicated validation process has been replaced by a simple API key now available in your account on the CloudFlare dashboard we’ve already verified you control your zone, there’s no need to prove it again.Ģ. And those who prefer more control over the process can use our API or CLI to issue certificates of specified validity, key type, and key size. With Origin CA, we took the opportunity to remove as many of these obstacles as possible.Ĭustomers more comfortable in the GUI can, with just two clicks, securely generate a private key and wildcard certificate that will be trusted by our systems for anywhere from 7 days to 15 years. Often this process requires intimate knowledge of OpenSSL or related command line tools, a reconfiguration of your web or DNS server to accommodate domain control validation, and a regularly scheduled reminder or cron job to perform this process again every year (or even every few months). Or many certificates if you’re using a provider that doesn’t support wildcards.
The most difficult and time-consuming part of securing your origin with TLS is obtaining-and renewing-a certificate. What are the incremental benefits of Origin CA over public certificates? We’re excited to introduce this third option for protecting your origin-more secure than self-signed certificates and more convenient, performant, and cost effective than publicly trusted certificates-and look forward to hearing about all the various ways you may use it. The result of us asking these questions and removing anything not needed to secure the connection between our servers and yours is described below, along with the benefits you may see and the interfaces you may use. We asked ourselves what cruft public CAs would remove from certificates if they only needed to work with one browser, whose codebase they maintained? Questions such as "why bloat certificates with intermediate CAs when they only need to speak with our NGINX-based reverse proxy" and "why force customers to reconfigure their web or name server to pass DCV checks when they’ve already demonstrated control during zone onboarding?" helped shape our efforts. With Origin CA, we questioned all aspects of certificate issuance and browser validation, from domain control validation (DCV) to path bundling and revocation checking. Our situation at CloudFlare is markedly different: we affirmatively control the edge of our network so we have the flexibility to build and operate a secure CA that’s capable of issuing highly streamlined certificates and ensuring they are utilized securely. As a result, public CAs are limited both in their ability to issue certificates optimized for inter-server communication, as well as in their ability to revoke certificates if they are compromised. Operating a public certificate authority is difficult because you don't directly control either endpoint of the HTTPS connection (browser or web server). Even though out-of-pocket costs of acquiring public CA certificates have since fallen to $0 since that post, we have continued to receive requests from our customers for an even easier (and more performant) option.
#Origin download fail install#
In just a few days we issued certificates protecting millions of our customers’ domains and became the easiest way to secure your website with SSL/TLS.Īt the time, we "strongly recommend that site owners install a certificate on their web servers so we can encrypt traffic to the origin." This recommendation was followed by a blog post describing two readily-available options for doing so-creating a self-signed certificate and purchasing a publicly trusted certificate-and a third, still-in-beta option: using our private CA.
In the fall of 2014 CloudFlare launched Universal SSL and doubled the number of sites on the Internet accessible via HTTPS.
#Origin download fail free#
Free and performant encryption to the origin for CloudFlare customers