Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority from the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) which is hosted by The Linux Foundation. Let’s Encrypt allows website owners to obtain SSL security certificates within minutes, eliminating the hassle getting a certificate to set up a secure website. Let’s Encrypt automates the process letting site operators turn on HTTPS with a single click or shell command.
Let’s Encrypt will launch in mid-2015, providing the ability to enable HTTPS for a site by installing a small piece of certificate management software on the server: The Let’s Encrypt management software will:
- Automatically prove to the Let’s Encrypt CA that you control the website
- Obtain a browser-trusted certificate and set it up on your web server
- Keep track of when your certificate is going to expire, and automatically renew it
- Help you revoke the certificate if that ever becomes necessary.
To learn more about how this works behind the scenes, check out Let’s Encrypt’s
technical overview. You can also read the full protocol specification on
Github.
Let’s Encrypt is offered by the ISRG, which is a California public benefit corporation with the mission to reduce financial, technological and education barriers to secure communication over the Internet. ISRG and Let’s Encrypt is hosted as a Linux Foundation
Collaborative Project, which offers independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.
By spreading the collaborative DNA of the largest collaborative software development project in history, The Linux Foundation provides a collaborative and organizational framework for projects that span the enterprise, mobile, embedded and life sciences markets and are backed by many of the largest names in technology.