Cloudflare + Mozilla: Helping build a better Internet, together

Cloudflare is proud to work alongside Mozilla to help develop, test, and deploy next-generation Internet standards. This video explores some of the benefits of this fruitful partnership.

The video features:

• Eric Rescorla, CTO, Firefox
• Selena Deckelmann, Vice President, Firefox Desktop
• Nick Sullivan, Head of Research & Cryptography, Cloudflare

Eric Rescorla: The real privilege of working at Mozilla is that we're a mission-driven organization, and what that means is that before we do things, we ask what's good for the user, as opposed to what's going to make the most money.

Nick Sullivan: Mozilla's values are similar to Cloudflare's. They care about enabling the web for everybody in a way that is secure, in a way that is private, and in a way that is trustworthy.

We've been collaborating on improving the protocols that help secure connections between browsers and websites.

Eric Rescorla: Mozilla and Cloudflare have collaborated on a wide range of technologies. The first place we really collaborated was the new TLS 1.3 protocol, and then we followed it up with QUIC and DNS over HTTPS, and most recently the new Firefox Private Network.

Selena Deckelmann: DNS is core to the way that everything on the Internet works. It's a very old protocol, and it's also in plain text, meaning that it's not encrypted. And this is something that a lot of people don't realize. You can be using SSL and connecting securely to websites, but your DNS traffic may still be unencrypted.

Eric Rescorla: When Mozilla was looking for a partner for providing encrypted DNS, Cloudflare was a natural fit.

The idea was that Cloudflare would run the server piece of it, and Mozilla would run the client piece of it. And the consequence would be that we'd protect DNS traffic for anybody who used Firefox.

Selena Deckelmann: Cloudflare was a great partner with this because they were really willing early on to implement the protocol, stand up a Trusted Recursive Resolver and create this experience for users. They were strong supporters of it.

Eric Rescorla: One of the great things about working with Cloudflare is their engineers are crazy fast. So the time between we decide to do something and we write down the barest protocol sketch, and they have it running in their infrastructure is a matter of days to weeks, not a matter of months to years. There's a difference between standing up a service that one person can use or ten people can use, and a service that everybody on the Internet can use.

Nick Sullivan: When we talk about bringing new protocols to the Web, we're talking about bringing it not to millions, not to tens of millions. We're talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people.

Selena Deckelmann: Cloudflare has been an amazing partner in the privacy front. They've been willing to be extremely transparent about the data that they are collecting and why they're using it. And they've also been willing to throw those logs away.

Eric Rescorla: Really users are getting two classes of benefits out of our partnership with Cloudflare. The first is direct benefits, that is: we're offering services to the user that make them more secure and we're offering them via Cloudflare. So that's like an immediate benefit that users are getting. The indirect benefit that users are getting is that we're developing the next generation of security and privacy technology and Cloudflare's helping us do it. And that will ultimately benefit every user — both Firefox users and every user on the Internet.

Nick Sullivan: We're really excited to work with an organization like Mozilla that is aligned with the user's interests and in taking the Internet and moving it in a direction that is more private, more secure, and is aligned with what we think the Internet should be.