Announcing Cloudflare OHTTP Gateway – expanding access to Cloudflare’s privacy-preserving infrastructure

What happened

Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) is an IETF standard designed to enable app backends to receive HTTP requests without seeing user IP addresses. Today, end users carry too much of the burden of online privacy. Cloudflare is an information and communications technology company based in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, some app developers end up knowing more about their users than they’d care to: a typical client-server exchange creates a trail of user data, like the client’s IP address or TLS (the encryption that secures a connection to a website) fingerprint. This level of visibility can be a burden.

That’s why Cloudflare builds infrastructure that helps developers bake privacy into their apps. An OHTTP relay blindly forwards encrypted requests in order to hide client identifiers from app servers.