Cloudflare under the hood: how it works and how attackers try to get around it (opens in new tab)

1. What Cloudflare actually is Cloudflare is not a reverse proxy running on one server somewhere. It is a globally distributed edge network with over 300 points of presence (PoPs). When you put your domain behind Cloudflare, you are routing all traffic through that network before it ever reaches your server The mechanism is anycast routing. Cloudflare announces the same IP address from every PoP simultaneously. When a user sends a request to your site, BGP routing automatically directs it to ...