Three years later, Let’s Encrypt has issued over 380 million HTTPS certificates
Bon anniversaire, Let’s Encrypt!
The free-to-use nonprofit was founded in 2014 in part by the Electronic
Frontier Foundation and is backed by Akamai, Google, Facebook, Mozilla
and more. Three years ago Friday, it issued its first certificate.
Since then, the numbers have exploded. To date, more than 380 million
certificates have been issued on 129 million unique domains. That also
makes it the largest certificate issuer in the world, by far.
Now, 75 percent of all Firefox traffic is HTTPS, according to public
Firefox data — in part thanks to Let’s Encrypt. That’s a massive
increase from when it was founded, where only 38 percent of website page
loads were served over an HTTPS encrypted connection.
“Change at that speed and scale is incredible,” a spokesperson told
TechCrunch. “Let’s Encrypt isn’t solely responsible for this change, but
we certainly catalyzed it.”
HTTPS is what keeps the pipes of the web secure. Every time your browser
lights up in green or flashes a padlock, it’s a TLS certificate
encrypting the connection between your computer and the website,
ensuring nobody can intercept and steal your data or modify the website.
But for years, the certificate market was broken, expensive and
difficult to navigate. In an effort to “encrypt the web,” the EFF and
others banded together to bring free TLS certificates to the masses.
That means bloggers, single-page websites and startups alike can get an
easy-to-install certificate for free — even news sites like TechCrunch
rely on Let’s Encrypt for a secure connection. Security experts and
encryption advocates Scott Helme and Troy Hunt last month found that
more than half of the top million websites by traffic are on HTTPS.
And as it’s grown, the certificate issuer has become trusted by the
major players — including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and more.
A fully encrypted web is still a ways off. But with close to a million
Let’s Encrypt certificates issued each day, it looks more within reach
than ever.
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