# CVE-2026-14440 — Cloudflare Universal SSL

> As of 2026-07-02, CVE-2026-14440 is a High-severity (band derived from the CVSS v4.0 score, not stated by the CNA) vulnerability in Cloudflare Universal SSL, CVSS v4.0 7.6, EPSS 0.0% (93.1th percentile). No Threadlinqs-tracked threat campaign has been attributed to CVE-2026-14440 as of 2026-07-02; the identifier is re-checked against the Threadlinqs threat corpus on every daily ingest.

**Last updated:** 2026-07-02

## What is CVE-2026-14440?

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

The record classifies CVE-2026-14440 under weakness class [CWE-358](https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/358.html). 1 affected-product entry is recorded, across 1 vendor, listed below. The identifier was first published 96 days ago.

## Severity and exploitation probability

- **CVSS v4.0 base score:** 7.6 — High (derived from score) (`CVSS:4.0/AV:A/AC:H/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N`)
- **EPSS (FIRST):** 0.0% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 93.1% of all scored CVEs
- **CISA KEV:** Not listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog
- **Threadlinqs priority:** 7.5/10 — a Threadlinqs composite of the CVSS base score, the EPSS percentile and public exploit availability
- **Published:** 2026-07-01, last modified 2026-07-02

## Is CVE-2026-14440 being exploited?

It currently carries a trending score of 53 in the Threadlinqs vulnerability feed.

## Affected products and versions

- **Cloudflare**: Universal SSL

## How to fix CVE-2026-14440

No vendor patch reference has been recorded for CVE-2026-14440 in the tracked sources. Follow the references below for a fix, and treat the products listed above as exposed until the vendor states otherwise.

## Threat activity tracking CVE-2026-14440

No threat campaign in the Threadlinqs corpus currently references CVE-2026-14440, in its CVE list or as an indicator. The linkage is recomputed from the live corpus on every daily ingest, so this section fills in as soon as a tracked campaign cites the identifier.

## Sources

Enriched from CVE.org, FIRST EPSS, GitHub Security Advisories. Last verified by Threadlinqs on 2026-07-02.

**Other references**

- [developers.cloudflare.com](https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/edge-certificates/caa-records/)
- [developers.cloudflare.com (limitations)](https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/edge-certificates/universal-ssl/limitations/)
- [rfc-editor.org](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8657)
- [rfc-editor.org (rfc8659)](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8659)

Canonical: https://intel.threadlinqs.com/cve/CVE-2026-14440
Full detection coverage and IOCs for threats exploiting CVE-2026-14440 via the Threadlinqs MCP server (Purple tier): https://intel.threadlinqs.com/mcp