Let's Encrypt

Let's Encrypt

Formation	2014; 3 years ago (2014)
Founder	Electronic Frontier Foundation Mozilla Foundation University of Michigan
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, U.S.
Services	X.509 certificate authority
Parent organization	Internet Security Research Group
Website	letsencrypt.org

Let's Encrypt is a certificate authority that launched on April 12, 2016 that provides free X.509 certificates for Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption via an automated process designed to eliminate the current complex process of manual creation, validation, signing, installation, and renewal of certificates for secure websites.

The project aims to make encrypted connections to World Wide Web servers ubiquitous. By eliminating payment, web server configuration, validation email management and certificate renewal tasks, it is meant to significantly lower the complexity of setting up and maintaining TLS encryption. On a Linux web server, execution of only two commands is sufficient to set up HTTPS encryption and acquire and install certificates.

To that end, a software package was included into the official Debian and Ubuntu software repositories. Current initiatives of major browser developers such as Mozilla and Google to deprecate unencrypted are counting on the availability of Let's Encrypt. The project is acknowledged to have the potential to accomplish encrypted connections as the default case for the entire web.

Only domain-validated certificates are being issued, since they can be fully automated. Organization Validation and Extended Validation Certificates are not available.

By being as transparent as possible, they hope to both protect their own trustworthiness and guard against attacks and manipulation attempts. For that purpose they regularly publish transparency reports, publicly log all ACME transactions (e.g. by using Certificate Transparency), and use open standards and free software as much as possible.