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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

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."

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/14/three-years-later-lets-encrypt-now-secures-75-of-the-web/

Previously: "Let's Encrypt" Has Issued 1 Million Certificates
Let's Encrypt Issues 100 Millionth Certificate
Let's Encrypt is Now Officially Trusted by All Major Root Programs

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Professor J. Alex Halderman, the noted election security researcher, along with his co-authors, have published a summary of Let's Encrypt, its components, and what it does. (Warning for PDF.) The service Let's Encrypt is a free, automated, open certificate authority (CA) to provide TLS certificates. These are usually for web sites, enabling them to provide HTTPS connections.

Since its launch in late 2015, Let's Encrypt has grown to become the world's largest HTTPS CA, accounting for more currently valid certificates than all other browser-trusted CAs combined. By January 2019, it had issued over 538 million certificates for 223 million domain names. We describe how we built Let's Encrypt, including the architecture of the CA software system (Boulder) and the structure of the organization that operates it (ISRG), and we discuss lessons learned from the experience. We also describe the design of ACME, the IETF-standard protocol we created to automate CA–server interactions and certificate issuance, and survey the diverse ecosystem of ACME clients, including Certbot, a software agent we created to automate HTTPS deployment. Finally, we measure Let's Encrypt's impact on the Web and the CA ecosystem. We hope that the success of Let's Encrypt can provide a model for further enhancements to the Web PKI and for future Internet security infrastructure.

[...] Prior to our work, a major barrier to wider HTTPS adoption was that deploying it was complicated, expensive, and error-prone for server operators. Let's Encrypt overcomes these through a strategy of automation: identity validation, certificate issuance, and server configuration are fully robotic, which also results in low marginal costs and enables the CA to provide certificates at no charge. We designed Let's Encrypt to scale to the size of the entire Web. In just over three years of operation, it is well on its way: it has issued over 538 million certificates and accounts for more valid browser-trusted certificates than all other CAs combined. We hope that in the near future, clients will start using HTTPS as the default Web transport. Eventually, we may marvel that there was ever a time when Web traffic traveled over the Internet as plaintext.

Let's Encrypt: An Automated Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web, Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Pages 2473-2487 (DOI: 10.1145/3319535.3363192

Earlier on SN:
Let's Encrypt to Transition to ISRG Root (2019)
Three Years Later, Let's Encrypt Has Issued Over 380 Million HTTPS Certificates (2018)
Let's Encrypt is Now Officially Trusted by All Major Root Programs (2018)
Let's Encrypt Takes Free "Wildcard" Certificates Live (2018)
Free Certs Come With a Cost (2017)
Let's Encrypt Issues 100 Millionth Certificate (2017)
Let's Encrypt Won its Comodo Trademark Battle - but Now Fan Tools Must Rename (2016)
Let's Encrypt Gets Automation (2015)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Let's Encrypt, the non-profit certificate authority which provides X.509 certificates for Transport Layer Security encryption at no charge, has an update on the progress towards universal acknowledgement of its root certificate in software and firmware. The cross signature which it has purchased will expire next September, so there is a hard deadline for finalization. There are only a few barriers remaining, one of which is the old versions of Android still in use.

Currently, 66.2% of Android devices are running version 7.1 or above. The remaining 33.8% of Android devices will eventually start getting certificate errors when users visit sites that have a Let's Encrypt certificate. In our communications with large integrators, we have found that this represents around 1-5% of traffic to their sites. Hopefully these numbers will be lower by the time DST Root X3 expires next year, but the change may not be very significant.

What can we do about this? Well, while we'd love to improve the Android update situation, there's not much we can do there. We also can't afford to buy the world a new phone. Can we get another cross-signature? We've explored this option and it seems unlikely. It's a big risk for a CA to cross-sign another CA's certificate, since they become responsible for everything that CA does. That also means the recipient of the cross-signature has to follow all the procedures laid out by the cross-signing CA. It's important for us to be able to stand on our own. Also, the Android update problem doesn't seem to be going away. If we commit ourselves to supporting old Android versions, we would commit ourselves to seeking cross-signatures from other CAs indefinitely.

It's quite a bind. We're committed to everybody on the planet having secure and privacy-respecting communications. And we know that the people most affected by the Android update problem are those we most want to help - people who may not be able to buy a new phone every four years. Unfortunately, we don't expect the Android usage numbers to change much prior to ISRG Root X1's expiration. By raising awareness of this change now, we hope to help our community to find the best path forward.

The Internet Archive has retained a copy of the original announcement for Let's Encrypt.

Previously:
(2020) Let's Encrypt Pushes Back Deadline to Revoke Some TLS Certificates
(2020) HTTPS for All: Let's Encrypt Reaches One Billion Certificates Issued [Updated]
(2019) Let's Encrypt: An Automated Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web
(2019) Let's Encrypt to Transition to ISRG Root
(2018) Let's Encrypt is Now Officially Trusted by All Major Root Programs

Original Submission