I had self-hosted services on a Raspberry Pi using Docker in my college room. Since I couldn’t set up port forwarding, I couldn’t enable HTTPS for them. I know that I can still have https without port forwarding but it is not straightforward and difficult for me. And, I used cloudflare tunnel to access them from outside my college network. When I access them using cloudflare tunnel, it uses HTTPS. However, I found conflicting information online about the connection between the server and cloudflare, with some sources saying it’s HTTP and others saying it’s HTTPS. What’s true?
The tunnels are encrypted. But I don’t know if they use SSL or something else.
The Tunnel daemon creates an encrypted tunnel between your origin web server and Cloudflare’s nearest data center, all without opening any public inbound ports.
The answer depends on how you’re serving your content. Based on what you’ve described about your setup, your content is likely served over HTTP through the secured tunnel. The tunnel acts like an encrypted VPN, which allows unencrypted content to be sent securely over the wire. This means although your web server is serving unencrypted content, it gets encrypted before it goes to Cloudflare, so no one along the path could snoop on it.
You should be able to set it up, which seems to be the crux of your question.
The reason for the conflict is likely that the traffic is encrypted through the tunnel, but cloudflare holds the certificates needed to verify the identity of your site and can see all the traffic.
But tunnels are done by having your server initiate the connection with cloudflare, so it behaves like a client in terms of networking, and it should work in most cases.
(Worth noting that video was against their policies for using at least the free tunnels last I was aware, so if that’s part of your use case you might not be able to use it.)
I believe Cloudflare has a trusted root cert that is distributed with browsers and such, and for tunnels, they generate a signed cert for that hostname interaction, and act as a reverse proxy to your machine when called. This should always show as an HTTPS host, but there must be a mechanism via DNS or something to identify and authorize your host to serve HTTPS, and if that lapses for some reason, I would assume they default to plain HTTP.
I’m just thinking about this logically and having used this particular setup though.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web HTTPS HTTP over SSL SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption VPN Virtual Private Network
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