Twelve years after launching Universal SSL, Cloudflare is applying to become a certificate authority. By combining an established root, an ACME-first approach, and Merkle Tree Certificates, we are building a post-quantum CA for the open web.

Cloudflare introduces an adaptive security framework connecting risk discovery, agent governance, runtime protection, and AI-powered response in a continuous learning loop.

As post-quantum signatures threaten to inflate TLS handshakes and certificate transparency logs, Merkle Tree Certificates offer a path to compact, auditable authentication. Cloudflare’s new certificate authority will support MTC issuance at scale.

We built a WAF tester that adapted each request based on what the WAF blocked or passed. This helped us explore variations that a fixed test might miss. We ran it across six attack categories on an authorized staging environment and discovered detection gaps worth fixing. Here’s how the loop worked, what got through, and what we did about it.