The essense of &quot;MITM&quot; isn&#x27;t the Middle but the fact that the Man is <i>unauthorized</i>, Eve to Alice and Bob. If Alice and Bob <i>agree</i> to put CloudFlare (oh, look, the C already works!) in between them, there&#x27;s a Middle but there&#x27;s no [unauthorized] Man.<p>SSL&#x27;s purpose isn&#x27;t to create some sort of quasi-mythical &quot;direct connection&quot; between Alice and Bob, it&#x27;s just removing the general Internet as a vector for many attacks. An utterly critical building block of the global Internet, but nothing more; certainly not a magic invocation that casts the spell of Security +1 across the entire communication, neither in fact nor in intent.<p>It&#x27;s worth taking a moment to try to explore what the idea of &quot;direct connection&quot; is that you have in your head, in a world where Bob is probably already a program generating HTTP with no human interaction in an arbitrarily-complicated manner, with arbitrarily-complicated combinations of SSL accelerators, WAFs, and whoknows what other network appliances, even <i>before</i> we consider what it means to assemble a page from JS and images from 10 different domains representing other entities, and where Alice is using a browser and arbitrary plugins, each of which she is implicitly trusting, and possibly a proxy. If you examine this closely it becomes surprisingly complicated.