Cloudflare, Inc. is an American web-infrastructure and website-security company, providing content-delivery-network services, DDoS mitigation, Internet security, and distributed domain-name-server services. Cloudflare's services sit between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare user's hosting provider, acting as a reverse proxy for websites. Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco. History Cloudflare was created in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. It received media attention in June 2011 for providing security services to the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group. Cloudflare acts as a reverse proxy for web traffic. Cloudflare supports web protocols, including SPDY and HTTP/2. In addition to this, Cloudflare offers support for HTTP/2 Server Push. From 2009, the company was venture-capital funded. On August 15, 2019, Cloudflare submitted its S-1 filing for IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock ticker NET. It opened for public trading on September 13, 2019, priced at $15 per share. In February 2014, Cloudflare mitigated what was at the time the largest ever recorded DDoS attack, which peaked at 400 Gigabits per second against an undisclosed customer. In November 2014, Cloudflare reported another massive DDoS attack with independent media sites being targeted at 500 Gbit/s. In March 2013, the company defended The Spamhaus Project from a DDoS attack that exceeded 300 Gbit/s. Akamai's chief architect stated that at the time it was "the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet". Cloudflare has also reportedly absorbed attacks that have peaked over 400Gbit/s from an NTP Reflection attack. In 2014, Cloudflare introduced an effort called Project Galileo in response to cyberattacks against vulnerable online targets, such as artists, activists, journalists, and human rights groups. Project Galileo provides such groups with free services to protect their websites. In 2019, Cloudflare announced that 600 users and organizations were participating in the project. On April 1, 2019, Cloudflare announced a new freemium Virtual Private Network service named WARP. The service would initially be available through the 1.1.1.1 mobile apps with a desktop app available later. 1.1.1.1 is a free Domain Name System (DNS) service. The public DNS service and servers are maintained and owned by Cloudflare in partnership with APNIC. The service functions as a recursive name server providing domain name resolution for any host on the Internet. The service was announced on April 1, 2018, and is claimed by Cloudflare to be "the Internet's fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service". On November 11, 2018, Cloudflare announced a mobile application of their 1.1.1.1 service for Android and iOS. On September 25, 2019, Cloudflare released WARP, an upgraded version of their original 1.1.1.1 mobile application. According to DNSPerf, 1.1.1.1 is the world's fastest recursive DNS resolver, beating other popular resolvers such as Google's Public DNS resolver. The 1.1.1.1 DNS service operates recursive name servers for public use at the four following IP addresses. The addresses are mapped to the nearest operational server by anycast routing. The DNS service is also available for Tor clients. Users can set up the service by manually changing their DNS resolvers to the IP addresses below. Mobile users on both Android and iPhone have the alternative of downloading the 1.1.1.1 mobile application, which automatically configures the DNS resolvers on the device. 1.1.1.1 is successful as a recursive DNS resolver because of Cloudflare's vast network. Cloudflare runs an authoritative DNS resolver with a network of over 20 million Internet properties. With the recursor and the resolver on the same network, DNS queries can be answered faster than the existing resolvers. With the release of the 1.1.1.1 mobile application in November 2018, Cloudflare added the ability for users to encrypt their DNS queries over HTTPS (DoH) or TLS (DoT). Later on, WARP was implemented using a new protocol, WireGuar
