The non-profit, free certificate authority Let’s Encrypt shared some news from their executive director as they approach their 10th anniversary in 2025:
Internally things have changed dramatically from what they looked like ten years ago, but outwardly our service hasn’t changed much since launch. That’s because the vision we had for how best to do our job remains as powerful today as it ever was: free 90-day TLS certificates via an automated API. Pretty much as many as you need. More than 500,000,000 websites benefit from this offering today, and the vast majority of the web is encrypted.
Our longstanding offering won’t fundamentally change next year, but we are going to introduce a new offering that’s a big shift from anything we’ve done before — short-lived certificates. Specifically, certificates with a lifetime of six days. This is a big upgrade for the security of the TLS ecosystem because it minimizes exposure time during a key compromise event.
Because we’ve done so much to encourage automation over the past decade, most of our subscribers aren’t going to have to do much in order to switch to shorter lived certificates. We, on the other hand, are going to have to think about the possibility that we will need to issue 20x as many certificates as we do now. It’s not inconceivable that at some point in our next decade we may need to be prepared to issue 100,000,000 certificates per day. That sounds sort of nuts to me today, but issuing 5,000,000 certificates per day would have sounded crazy to me ten years ago… It was hard to build Let’s Encrypt. It was difficult to scale it to serve half a billion websites…
Charitable contributions from people like you and organizations around the world make this stuff possible. Since 2015, tens of thousands of people have donated. They’ve made a case for corporate sponsorship, given through their Donor-Advised Funds, or set up recurring donations, sometimes to give $3 a month. That’s all added up to millions of dollars that we’ve used to change the Internet for nearly everyone using it.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader rastos1 for sharing the news.
