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OpenAdvisories
Medium VA-26-183-01 1 CVE

Cloudflare Universal SSL CAA record override

Published Jul 2, 2026 · Updated Jul 21, 2026 · Revision 3

Summary

Cloudflare Universal SSL automatically manages the CAA RRset for customer zones in order to issue and renew TLS certificates. In affected Universal SSL configurations, Cloudflare authoritative DNS can serve an auto-managed CAA RRset at query time that supersedes customer-configured CAA records. As a result, Certificate Authorities may not observe customer-configured RFC 8657 accounturi or validationmethods parameters when evaluating CAA under RFC 8659. Customers may therefore believe strict certificate-issuance controls are enforced, while those controls are not preserved end-to-end for Universal SSL zones. Successful exploitation is non-trivial and requires a strong network position plus successful domain validation, but misissuance could result in a browser-trusted TLS certificate and enable MITM against the affected domain.

Vulnerabilities 1

  • High 7.6
    CVE-2026-14440 Public exploit

    Cloudflare Universal SSL automatically managed CAA RRset supersedes customer-configured CAA records

    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 pa…

Revision history

  1. #2.0.1

    Version history correction

  2. #2.0.0

    Edited summary, mitigation and recommended practices

  3. #1.0.0

    Initial publication