A few months ago, Let’s Encrypt, the free and open certificate authority project to provide SSL certs for the public with no cost, hit an incredible number: 2 billion HTTPS certificates. That’s a milestone in itself (Who knew there were so many websites on the internet?), but they weren’t satisfied with that.
Since then, they have now issued 3 billion certificates–that’s 9 million per day! They’ve issued more than any other CA in the world combined. Let’s Encrypt is now 50% more efficient per capita than the industry average. That’s pretty impressive!
Let’s Encrypt has also issued a total of 25 million wildcard certificates, so that people can run websites with a single certificate for the main domain and all subdomains (like *.example.com). As far as I know, Let’s Encrypt is the only CA to offer support for wildcard certificates.
Right now, Let’s Encrypt certificates are trusted by 54% of the internet’s most popular websites. That’s because they’ve worked hard to make it easy and automated to get a certificate–you can get one here, in 10 seconds.
Let’s Encrypt and Mozilla helped develop a standard called ACME that makes it possible for other CAs to issue certificates without providing human-readable validation (which would be insecure). That standard is now supported by all the major CAs and is here to stay.
Let’s Encrypt just hit a big milestone in certificate issuance. Their 3 billionth certificate was issued today, to the US government! The US government didn’t have to pay anything for this certificate, which means that there’s a huge benefit in terms of security and privacy that comes with having Let’s Encrypt as your CA.
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