What is a Ray ID (Cloudflare)?

Question

Every time I visit a website that is using Cloudflare's Under-Attack-Mode, it shows me the usual text telling me to wait a few seconds until Cloudflare verified I am not a bot. Every time I reload the page it changes my current Ray ID.

What is the purpose of a Ray ID? Is it some kind of session ID?

Greenshank

Answer 1

It is a UID which can be used by the website operator (and Cloudflare support) to potentially debug issues. The ray id is actually returned in the headers of most requests through Cloudflare, just not as visibly as what you see in the case of I'm under attack mode.

Disillusion

As it's not explicitly mentioned, yet: it's a unique id per request, i.e. not a session id as suspected in the question. The CF-Ray header is a hashed value encoding information about the data center and the visitor’s request See support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/… – Vandiver

I'm only wondering why they reveal this to the client. IT could've been logged to the server and from there they could also identify some issues and debug if necessary. – Evacuate

@DanielDanielecki ray id help IT find the log relate to the client. without ray id IT hard to filter log that is relate to specific client. – Richardo

Since Cloudflare data is being used to block potential hackers, they reveal the Ray ID to the user so that the user can log a complaint in case the user feels it was an illegitimate block. – Oolite

Answer 2

I will try to explain both in simple words, Cloudfare and Ray ID.

Cloudfare: This is a service sitting in front of servers tasked with the ability to handle requests and allow response depending upon multiple security parameters. The service provides website security, performance optimization and DDoS protection. The service mimics a reverse proxy. When a request is sent to Cloudfare, it initially hits one of the edge servers (Content Delivery Network) strategically placed across the continent. This helps to fetch cached data at a rapid pace without the need to traverse to the origin server to fetch the content.

Ray ID: Ray ID is a unique identifier generated by Cloudflare's edge servers, and is included in the response headers of each request processed by these edge servers and is used to help identify specific requests when troubleshooting issues. Other than issues, it helps to track the request, request specifier, topo location and auditing becomes easier.

Hope, it clears the doubt

Dislocation