Cloudflare sets out to become a certificate authority for the whole Internet

Twelve years ago, in 2014, Cloudflare switched on Universal SSL and nearly doubled the number of encrypted sites on the web overnight, handing free TLS to every property behind its network. Now the company is taking the next step: it has announced its intent to become a public certificate authority (CA). For over a decade one of the largest consumers of publicly trusted certificates in the world, Cloudflare has never issued a single one itself — and that is changing.

The first concrete steps are done. Applications have been filed for inclusion in the Chrome, Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla root programs, and a definitive agreement has been signed to acquire an established, broadly trusted root from GlobalSign, so that certificates can reach the widest possible range of devices from day one. Issuance has not started yet — the company promises to do the work in public and share each milestone as it lands.

Two paths to trust

A brand-new root becomes genuinely useful only after years: it must propagate across operating systems, browsers, and devices, and it will never reach clients that stopped receiving updates. That long tail carries a great deal of the world's traffic. The acquired GlobalSign root, trusted since 2012, solves compatibility immediately, while the new roots meet the requirements of future policies that cap how old a trusted root may be.

Another source of free certificates

The free, automated issuance model now carries most of the encrypted web, much of it through Let's Encrypt — on the order of ten million certificates a day and more than 500 million sites. Cloudflare, itself one of that authority's largest users, sees a systemic risk: if the dominant free CA had a bad week, there would be no comparable replacement ready. A public CA is the same redundancy idea already built into the company's own certificates, but at the scale of the entire Internet.

The service will be ACME-first: issuance and renewal through the open ACME protocol. Moving to Cloudflare will be as simple as changing a directory URL, with no new tooling required.

Resilience and a post-quantum future

Cloudflare intends to build the CA around the principle of "failing small," limiting the blast radius of any single error. Automated renewal will be a condition of issuance: certificates will go only to clients that support ARI (RFC 9773). The company plans to publish reproducible builds of its signing software, attest the hardware modules holding its keys, and run a public issuance-health dashboard.

Cloudflare aims to be among the first authorities to issue Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs) — a more compact format built for a post-quantum world where classic chains grow too heavy for TLS handshakes. The first MTCs are expected in the first quarter of 2027. Classic certificates and MTCs will live under one CA, so customers can migrate at their own pace without a hard cutover.

Source: Cloudflare Blog