7.6
HIGH CVSS 4.0
CVE-2026-14440
Cloudflare Universal SSL automatically managed CAA RRset supersedes customer-configured CAA records
Description

Description: To issue and renew TLS certificates on behalf of customers, Cloudflare's Universal SSL feature automatically manages the CAA RRset for the customer's zone. This auto-managed RRset is permissive by design (e.g. 'issue "letsencrypt.org"' without parameters). On Universal SSL zones, Cloudflare's authoritative DNS serves this auto-managed RRset at query time, superseding any customer-configured CAA records on the zone. When a customer publishes a stricter CAA record using the RFC 8657 accounturi or validationmethods parameters, the Certificate Authority does not observe those parameters when evaluating the served RRset under RFC 8659. As a result, the RFC 8657 account-binding and validation-method-binding protections are not enforced end-to-end on Universal SSL zones. Successful exploitation could result in issuance of a browser-trusted TLS certificate to an attacker, enabling MITM against the affected domain. Exploitation is non-trivial in practice: an attacker would need to hold an ACME account at one of the Certificate Authorities in the served CAA RRset and to simultaneously satisfy domain control validation across the multiple geographically distinct Network Perspectives the CA relies on for Multi-Perspective Issuance Corroboration. Cloudflare prefixes are anycast-announced from hundreds of locations globally, raising the bar against single-vantage-point BGP hijacks. Any resulting misissuance of a browser-trusted certificate is subject to Certificate Transparency logging required by major browsers, and would be visible to CT monitoring. Mitigation:  Customers requiring strict RFC 8657 enforcement need to disable Universal SSL on the affected zone. Universal SSL's automatic CAA management and customer-set RFC 8657 accounturi and validationmethods enforcement are mutually exclusive by the nature of the issue, so there is no in-product workaround that preserves both.  Certificate Transparency monitoring is recommended for all customers as a general detection control. Credits: David Osipov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2713-9242), independent researcher

INFO

Published Date :

July 1, 2026, 10:35 p.m.

Last Modified :

July 1, 2026, 10:35 p.m.

Remotely Exploit :

No

Source :

cloudflare
Affected Products

The following products are affected by CVE-2026-14440 vulnerability. Even if cvefeed.io is aware of the exact versions of the products that are affected, the information is not represented in the table below.

No affected product recoded yet

CVSS Scores
The Common Vulnerability Scoring System is a standardized framework for assessing the severity of vulnerabilities in software and systems. We collect and displays CVSS scores from various sources for each CVE.
Score Version Severity Vector Exploitability Score Impact Score Source
CVSS 4.0 HIGH a22f1246-ba21-4bb4-a601-ad51614c1513
Solution
Disable Universal SSL for strict RFC 8657 enforcement and enable Certificate Transparency monitoring.
  • Disable Universal SSL on affected zones.
  • Enable Certificate Transparency monitoring.
  • Review CAA record configurations.

We scan GitHub repositories to detect new proof-of-concept exploits. Following list is a collection of public exploits and proof-of-concepts, which have been published on GitHub (sorted by the most recently updated).

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EPSS is a daily estimate of the probability of exploitation activity being observed over the next 30 days. Following chart shows the EPSS score history of the vulnerability.