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Network Networking Technology IT

Cloudflare Says Its New VPN Service Won't Slow You Down (wired.com) 73

Posted by msmash from the interesting-services dept.
Cloudflare has announced that it's adding a VPN service to its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver app. The 1.1.1.1 service, which first came to mobile back in November, currently attempts to speed up mobile data speeds by using Cloudflare's network to resolve DNS queries faster than your existing mobile network. From a report: "We wanted to build a VPN service that my dad would install on his phone," says Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. "If you tell him that it will make his connection more private and secure, he'd never do it. But if you tell him it will make his connection faster, make his phone's battery last longer, and make his connections more private, then it would be something he'd install."

Mobile phone users can begin signing up for the service, dubbed Warp, through Cloudflare's mobile app 1.1.1.1 on Monday; Cloudflare says it hopes the service is working Monday, but it might take a few days. Regardless, Warp is a sign of things to come for the rest of the internet. The technology that Cloudflare is betting will make Warp fast is a protocol invented by Google called QUIC, and it could one day make the rest of the internet faster and more reliable. QUIC is essentially a substitute for TCP, the venerable protocol now used for most internet connections. TCP, introduced in 1981, made reliable internet connections possible, says Jana Iyengar, who worked on QUIC for Google; Iyengar is now a distinguished engineer at the cloud computing company Fastly working to help finalize QUIC with the Internet Engineering Task Force standards body.
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Cloudflare Says Its New VPN Service Won't Slow You Down More

Cloudflare Says Its New VPN Service Won't Slow You Down

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  • TL;DR: This is not a secure VPN (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    > "If you tell him that it will make his connection more private and secure, he'd never do it. But if you tell him it will make his connection faster"

    So they see no value in security or privacy. Also, they are one of the silicon valley pro-censorship stalwarts.

    This is a VN, with no P.

    No thanks.

  • Google not Googling (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 01, 2019 @12:41PM (#58367036)

    NordVPN for the win (which uses OpenVPN and can be used completely without the NordVPN apps)....

    But you have to get the adblocking version on Nord's website. Google, in their infinite wisdom, doesn't allow adblocking apps to be hosted on their app store.

    If Google is behind anything, you can bet it will have a way to serve you ads no matter what else it does. And that is a security risk. They will always chose profits over customer safety.

  • "more private and secure" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Monday April 01, 2019 @12:42PM (#58367052)
    "more private and secure" by running all of your traffic through Cloudflare!

    I just shot water out of my nose. Funniest thing I read all day.

    • Re:"more private and secure" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Monday April 01, 2019 @02:03PM (#58367574) Homepage
      The question is not how much should I trust Cloudflare as a VPN... because that one is easy. The real question is do I trust Cloudflare more than AT&T. That's a little harder to answer.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DogDude ( 805747 )
        Good point. While AT&T probably owns 50% (with Spectrum/Time-Warner owning roughly the other half) of the Internet in the US, I think that Cloudflare probably has traffic running from 75-95% of it.

      • "The question is not how much should I trust Cloudflare as a VPN... because that one is easy. The real question is do I trust Cloudflare more than AT&T."

        Why are those ypur only options? Because you don't want to set up a recursive caching DNS service (or use some network appliance that does this for you)?

        In my case, it's a choice between trusting an American company subject to American laws/secret letters etc. vs. my local telco/ISP (we have virtual ISPs that are effectively VPNs over the incumbent's DS

    • Your traffic is running through Cloudflare anyway. It may as well do so in a way that your ISP doesn't also see it.

  • "battery last longer"? (Score:3)

    by scorp1us ( 235526 ) on Monday April 01, 2019 @01:05PM (#58367218) Journal

    I run a VPN on my phone already and I notice that there is substantially more battery usage with it than without. It makes sense: You're taking all that data and encrypting it. I don't know how you could encrypt the data and use LESS battery?

    Anyone have an idea?

    • Using a dedicated chip would help. Manufacturers have in fact included dedicated units in their CPUs for operations like AES encryption, but I’m not sure mobile chips include those.

  • A company spokesman elaborated on their promises by affirm the company would “Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you down. Never gonna run around and desert you.”

  • VPN Not Secure (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    A guy who, by his own admission, woke up one morning and decided he didn't like what some people were saying on the Internet and decided to use his company to wipe them off the Web now wants us to trust his company with our privacy. Are you fucking kidding me you utter moron?

  • QUIC is a bit of a nightmare (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Monday April 01, 2019 @01:12PM (#58367272) Homepage

    All the finely-tuned network stacks out there are basically being thrown out the window... congestion management, buffering/resend, parsing, etc. are all being re-written into the QUIC protocol. The spec is so large that they had split it up into several smaller specs -- to start, things are going to be buggy, incompatible, and perform poorly. QUIC makes me nervous.

    And Google's QUIC, which was very HTTP focused, is almost unrecognizable now that it's gone through IETF, where it was split into the two protocols HTTP/3, and the generic multi-stream transport QUIC.

    • On the other hand, QUIC was carefully designed with all the past experience of network protocol failures. So it tries very hard to avoid even the possibility of ossification.

      TCP is bad because it's basically set in stone. It's not possible to change a single bit in the TCP/IP spec without breaking untold millions of badly designed middleboxes.

    • All the finely-tuned network stacks out there are basically being thrown out the window... congestion management, buffering/resend, parsing, etc. are all being re-written

      And Google's QUIC, which was very HTTP focused, is almost unrecognizable [and] split into the two protocols HTTP/3, and the generic multi-stream transport QUIC.

      So in other words: InternetD for ALL!

      Just like movies, why do something new when we can re-invent the wheel doing the same thing but with newer actors that don't know what they're doing?

  • never to cum in your mouth.

  • The technology that Cloudflare is betting will make Warp fast is a protocol invented by Google called QUIC, and it could one day make the rest of the internet faster and more reliable.

    Most operators I know are blocking QUIC because it's way too aggressive.

    When a single QUIC session intentionally consumes twice the bandwidth of the sum total of 20 TCP sessions over a bandwidth constrained link Huston we have a problem. Not a small problem but a massive unsustainable one.

  • Anyone tested this on the dark side of the planet yet?

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