Let's Encrypt

Technical Beauty — Episode 29 Before 2015, HTTPS was a luxury. A domain-validated certificate cost up to $50 per year. Extended validation: $1,500. Renewal was manual: generate a CSR, email it to a certificate authority, wait for human approval, download the certificate, install it, configure the web server, set a calendar reminder to do it all again in twelve months. Then four people decided this was absurd. The People Josh Aas and Eric Rescorla at Mozilla. Peter Eckersley at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. J. Alex Halderman at the University of Michigan. They met at RSA Conference 2012, merged their parallel efforts in 2013, and issued the first certificate on 14 September 2015. Peter Eckersley died in September 2022. He was 43. He co-designed the ACME protocol that made all of this possible. The internet is encrypted in large part because of him. The Numbers 700 million websites. 10 million certificates issued per day. Firefox HTTPS traffic: from 39% in 2016 to 80% today. One bi