Cloudflare Authenticate And Generate Api Key

Posted : admin On 16.04.2020

Jan 10, 2020 Dear All, I’m trying to update an A record (or view one) via http url (is the only way I can do it right now). How can I send my credentials directly on the URL, and not via headers? Setting up a Multi-User account. Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard. Choose the account that you would like to update. Click the Members tab. Enter the email address of the member you want to invite to your account. Click Invite. That member will receive an email invitation from Cloudflare to join your account. All requests to the Cloudflare Workers REST API must. Be sent over HTTPS; Send a JSON body (unless otherwise indicated) contain valid identification headers (Find your Cloudflare Auth info). Using API Tokens: Authorization - provide an API token in standard Bearer format. Using Email and Global API Key.

  1. Cloudflare Authenticate And Generate Api Key Free
  2. Cloudflare Authenticate And Generate Api Key Download

We built Access to solve a problem here at Cloudflare: our VPN. Our team members hated the slowness and inconvenience of VPN but, that wasn’t the issue we needed to solve. The security risks posed by a VPN required a better solution.

VPNs punch holes in the network perimeter. Once inside, individuals can access everything. This can include critically sensitive content like private keys, cryptographic salts, and log files. Cloudflare is a security company; this situation was unacceptable. We need a better method that gives every application control over precisely who is allowed to reach it.

Access meets that need. We started by moving our browser-based applications behind Access. Team members could connect to applications faster, from anywhere, while we improved the security of the entire organization. However, we weren’t yet ready to turn off our VPN as some tasks are better done through a command line. We cannot #EndTheVPN without replacing all of its use cases. Reaching a server from the command line required us to fall back to our VPN.

Api

Today, we’re releasing a beta command line tool to help your team, and ours. Before we started using this feature at Cloudflare, curling a server required me to stop, find my VPN client and credentials, login, and run my curl command. With Cloudflare’s command line tool, cloudflared, and Access, I can run $ cloudflared access curl https://example.com/api and Cloudflare authenticates my request to the server. I save time and the security team at Cloudflare can control who reaches that endpoint (and monitor the logs).

Protect your API with Cloudflare Access

To protect an API with Access, you’ll follow the same steps that you use to protect a browser-based application. Start by adding the hostname where your API is deployed to your Cloudflare account.

Just like web applications behind Access, you can create granular policies for different paths of your HTTP API. Cloudflare Access will evaluate every request to the API for permission based on settings you configure. Placing your API behind Access means requests from any operation, CLI or other, will continue to be gated by Cloudflare. You can continue to use your API keys, if needed, as a second layer of security.

Reach a protected API

Cloudflare Access protects your application by checking for a valid JSON Web Token (JWT), whether the request comes through a browser or from the command line. We issue and sign that JWT when you successfully login with your identity provider. That token contains claims about your identity and session. The Cloudflare network looks at the claims in that token to determine if the request should proceed to the target application.

When you use a browser with Access, we redirect you to your identity provider, you login, and we store that token in a cookie. Authenticating from the command line requires a different flow, but relies on the same principles. When you need to reach an application behind Access from your command line, the Cloudflare CLI tool, cloudflared, launches a browser window so that you can login with your identity provider. Once you login, Access will generate a JWT for your session, scoped to your user identity.

Rather than placing that JWT in a cookie, Cloudflare transfers the token in a cryptographically secure handoff to your machine. The client stores the token for you so that you don’t need to re-authenticate each time. The token is valid for the session duration as configured in Access.

When you make requests from your command line, Access will look for an HTTP header, cf-access-token, instead of a cookie. We’ll evaluate the token in that header and on every request. If you use cURL, we can help you move even faster.cloudflared includes a subcommand that wraps cURL and injects the JWT into the header for you.

Why use cloudflared to reach your application?

With cloudflared and its cURL wrapper, you can perform any cURL operation against an API protected by Cloudflare Access. Generate private key openssl csr.

  • Control endpoint access for specific users
    Cloudflare Access can be configured to protect specific endpoints. For example, you can create a rule that only a small group within your team can reach a particular URL path. You can apply that granular protection to sensitive endpoints so that you control who can reach those, while making other parts of the tool available to the full team.
  • Download sensitive data
    Placing applications with sensitive data behind Access lets you control who can reach that information. If a particular file is stored at a known location, you can save time by downloading it to your machine from the command line instead of walking through the UI flow.

What's next?

CLI authentication is available today to all Access customers through the cloudflared tool. Just add the API hostname to your Cloudflare account and enable Access to start building policies that control who can reach that API. If you do not have an Access subscription yet, you can read more about the plans here and sign up.

Once you’re ready to continue ditching your VPN, follow this link to install cloudflared today. The tool is in beta and does not yet support automated scripting or service-to-service connections. Full instructions and known limitations can be found here. If you are interested in providing feedback, you can post your comments in this thread.

In a traditional TLS handshake, the client authenticates the server, and the server doesn’t know too much about the client. However, starting now, Cloudflare is offering enterprise customers TLS with client authentication, meaning that the server additionally authenticates that the client connecting to it is authorized to connect.

TLS Client Authentication is useful in cases where a server is keeping track of hundreds of thousands or millions of clients, as in IoT, or in a mobile app with millions of installs exchanging secure information. For example, an IoT company can issue a unique client certificate per device, and then limit connections to their IoT infrastructure to only their devices by blocking connections where the client doesn’t present a certificate signed by the company’s certificate authority.

Or in the case of a mobile banking app, where the bank wants to ensure customers’ secure financial data doesn’t get stolen by bots spoofing their mobile app, they can issue a unique certificate to every app install and in the TLS handshake validate requests are coming from their mobile app. Client authentication is also useful for VPNs, enterprise networks or staging sites, where corporations and developers need to lock down connections to only laptops and phones owned by their employees and teammates.

You may be thinking - don’t we have API keys for that? But client certificates offer a layer of security that API keys cannot provide. If an API key gets compromised mid-connection, it can be reused to fire its own valid, trusted requests to the backend infrastructure. However, the private key of the client certificate is used to create a digital signature in every TLS connection, and so even if the certificate is sniffed mid-connection, new requests can’t be instantiated with it.

Handshakes With TLS Client Auth

In a handshake with TLS Client Authentication, the server expects the client to present a certificate, and sends the client a client certificate request with the server hello. Then in the key exchange in the next trip to the server, the client also sends its client certificate. The client certificate is then used to sign the TLS handshake and the digital signature is sent to the server for verification. You can see the whole handshake here:

TLS Client Authentication On The Edge

TLS Client Authentication can be CPU intensive to implement - it’s an additional cryptographic operation on every request. And if there’s a flood of invalid traffic, each request in that traffic flood kicks off a verification step. Companies can move the TLS client authentication to Cloudflare’s edge to offload the expensive verification.

If we are performing TLS Client Authentication for a company, the company sends us the root certificate(s) we should validate the client certificates against. Then the company can set TLS Client Authentication to one of two modes: enforce mode returns a 403 and optional custom JSON or HTML when the client certificate is invalid, and report mode forwards all requests to the origin, even if the certificate is invalid. Cloudflare will send a header including the status of the certificate (none, valid, invalid) and the certificate Subject Key Identifier (SKI) to the origin. For companies that use the client certificate for identification, Cloudflare can also forward any field of the client certificate as a custom header.

Get Started

To use TLS client authentication, you must first set up PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) infrastructure to issue client certificates. If you are interested in running TLS client authentication but don’t have PKI infrastructure set up to issue client certificates, we have open sourced our PKI for you to use. Here is great documentation by our friends at CoreOS on how to use cfssl to issue client certificates. If you prefer not to run your own CA and rely on an established certificate authority, we have partnered with a few certificate authorities who can provide the client certificates for you.

If you are an enterprise customer and would like to get started using TLS client authentication with Cloudflare, reach out to your account team and we’ll help you get setup. If you are not yet an enterprise customer but are interested in trying out TLS client authentication, get in touch.

Cloudflare Authenticate And Generate Api Key Free

Within the next year, we’ll be adding TLS client authentication support for all Cloudflare plans. After all, using encryption to make the web more trusted is what we’re about. Stay tuned.

Cloudflare Authenticate And Generate Api Key Download

UPDATE - 1/22/19: This functionality has changed and is being incorporated into Cloudflare Access. A beta is currently underway. Apologies for any confusion.