how to hide your origin IP properly sounds like a narrow topic. It turns out to touch almost every part of how an edge network behaves under attack.
Protecting the origin
None of this matters if the attacker can reach your origin directly. Historical DNS records, certificate transparency logs and misconfigured subdomains leak origin addresses all the time.
Allow-list the edge ranges, enable authenticated origin pulls and treat any origin IP that ever appeared in public DNS as burned.
Observability first
Every mitigation decision is logged with its reasons, and every log line can be traced to the rule and score components that produced it. When a customer asks why a request was challenged, the answer is a link, not a guess.
Logs stream to the customer’s SIEM within seconds, which also means their security team sees attacks in the same tools they use for everything else.
Challenges beat blocks
Blocking lists go stale within minutes when attackers rotate through residential proxies. Proof-of-work does not care where a request comes from; it only cares whether the client is willing to pay the cost.
For a real browser that cost is a few hundred milliseconds, once per session. For a botnet sending a million requests a minute it is a million puzzles a minute — and at that point the attack stops being cheap.
Testing in production, safely
Every rule starts in log mode. We replay the previous seven days of traffic through it and show exactly which requests it would have affected before anyone can promote it to challenge or block.
This one feature has prevented more incidents than any detection we have ever shipped.
We will follow up with the numbers from the next quarter.