Cloudflare is launching the Cloudflare OHTTP Gateway, a paid add-on that lets customers receive Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) traffic with minimal setup. OHTTP is an IETF standard enabling app backends to receive HTTP requests without seeing user IP addresses. Requests travel through a relay and a gateway, separating trust so no single party sees both client identifiers and request contents. In 2022, Cloudflare launched its OHTTP relay product, now renamed Cloudflare OHTTP Relay. Customers already behind Cloudflare previously needed to run their own gateway; the new managed gateway removes that burden. The closed beta targets app servers on Cloudflare's CDN or Workers, or those accepting OHTTP requests from third parties like Apple's Live Caller ID. Cloudflare aims to make privacy infrastructure accessible to more developers.
With OHTTP, a relay forwards encrypted requests while a gateway performs cryptographic decapsulation. This separation ensures neither party sees both client data and request contents. Companies like Flo Health and Apple's Private Cloud Compute already use Cloudflare's OHTTP relay for privacy-preserving features.
The new OHTTP Gateway complements the existing relay, giving customers two deployment options. Those hosting servers off Cloudflare can use the relay with a self-hosted gateway, while Cloudflare-hosted customers can pair the managed gateway with a third-party relay. Cloudflare's goal is expanding privacy infrastructure adoption across the Internet.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing