Cloudflare open sources pvcli privacy proxy CLI for Oblivious HTTP debugging

Cloudflare said it is open sourcing privacy-client, or pvcli, a command-line tool for debugging privacy-preserving network protocols, under the Apache-2.0 License on GitHub via cloudflareresearch/pvcli. The company said pvcli wraps lessons from operating protocols such as Oblivious HTTP at millions of requests per second. Oblivious HTTP is designed so no single party can know both who made a request and what is being requested, using a relay and a gateway run by non-colluding parties. Cloudflare said its Privacy Proxy and Privacy Gateway products power services including Apple Private Relay, Microsoft Edge Secure Network VPN, and Flo Health Anonymous Mode. The firm said customers had needed one-off test clients, root-cause work across multiple protocol steps was slow, and binary HTTP encoding made manual inspection error-prone. pvcli is curl-like and can issue full Oblivious HTTP requests with relay and gateway endpoints, verbose step logging, first-hop headers, and mTLS to the relay. Cloudflare said the tool is meant to cover more than OHTTP over time, with CONNECT proxying, MASQUE, and Privacy Pass on the roadmap, and that it is accepting contributions.