Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt has issued a million free certificates

March 8, 2016 at 9:04 GMT, the certificate authority Let's Encrypt issued a millionth TLS certificate .

Let's Encrypt is a non-profit initiative of the Mozilla organization and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), created for the benefit of the community. The owner of any domain can get a TLS certificate here for free and it is very easy to install it ( step-by-step instruction on Habré). Closed beta testing began on September 12, 2015, and since December 3, certificates will be issued to anyone without prior registration and invites.
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This is a terrific project success: it took only 3 months and 5 days to issue a million certificates.






Since a single certificate can be valid for multiple domains , the million certificates issued actually cover 2.5 million domain names. Of these, more than 90% were not previously available via HTTPS, according to EFF statistics.

EFF stands for full encryption of traffic over HTTPS, and notes that the obstacle to this was previously the cost of certificates and the bureaucratic procedure for obtaining. Because of this, many did not dare to switch to HTTPS, even after it became apparent that it was necessary to enable HTTPS by default.

Let's Encrypt certificates are free, and many bureaucratic problems have been resolved, including automatic configuration and automatic renewal of certificates, so that the lifetime of certificates for 90 days is not a particular problem.

The co-founders of Let's Encrypt are Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the University of Michigan. Akamai and Cisco provided significant financial support for the project launch, many other organizations sponsored the project.

Let's Encrypt continues to work in beta testing. Developers are invited to participate in the finalization of the server and client software.