Privacy Pass protocol. Importantly, it allows Cloudflare to validate that clients are who they say they are without collecting or storing personal information from Microsoft users.Once the client has presented the proxy server with a valid token, the Privacy Proxy then chooses a valid egress IP address based on a hash of the client’s geolocation. It then uses the DNS record (provided by Cloudflare’s DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1) to open up an encrypted session to the origin website. From there, it’s pretty straightforward: if the user continues to browse on that site, further requests will be sent through that connection, if they stop or close the browser, that connection will close as well.
Because Cloudflare proxies millions of requests per second, many of the operational aspects of the proxy are managed by Oxy, our proxying framework that handles everything from telemetry, graceful restarts, to stream multiplexing and IP fallbacks, and authentication hooks.
Low last-mile latency and geolocation parity thanks to Cloudflare’s Network
Cloudflare’s privacy proxy implementation maximizes user experience without sacrificing privacy. When Edge Secure Network is enabled, users will have search and browsing results relevant to where they’re geographically located. At Cloudflare, we call this the pizza test: people should be able to use any of our privacy proxy products and still be able to get results for “pizza places near me”. We accomplish this by always egressing through a Cloudflare data center that has an IP address that corresponds to the user’s location – we’ve written more about how we did this for 1.1.1.1+WARP.
Unlike your typical VPN operator that has dozens – sometimes hundreds – of servers, Cloudflare has a much larger footprint: data centers in over 300 cities. Because our network is an anycast “every service, everywhere” approach, each of our data centers can accept traffic from an Edge Secure network client. This means that Edge users will automatically detect and connect with a Cloudflare data center geographically very close to them, minimizing last-mile latency. Finally, because Cloudflare also operates a CDN, websites that are already on Cloudflare will be given a “hot-path,” and will load faster.
We at Cloudflare are always striving to bring more privacy options to the open Internet, and we are excited to provide more private and secure browsing to Edge users. To learn more, head to Microsoft’s Edge Secure Network page or Microsoft’s support page. If you’re a partner interested in using a privacy-preserving proxy like this one, fill out this form.