Nonprofit certificate authority Let’s Encrypt has recently hit a major milestone, announcing that it has issued its three billionth HTTPS certificate. While it took them five years to issue its billionth certificate, the three billion mark was reached just two years later.
Let’s Encrypt was founded in 2013, offering free SSL and TLS certificates to websites so they could enable HTTPS and encrypted communications. The organization, run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, issued its first HTTPS certificate in September 2015 for its own domain and the rest, as they say, is history.
These days, Let’s Encrypt is providing TLS to more than 309 million domains, which is an increase of 12% compared to the year earlier.
The ISRG also revealed in its 2022 annual report that 82% of web pages loaded by Firefox are using HTTPS globally. In contrast, when Let’s Encrypt was founded – that figure was 38%.
The massive growth comes as Let’s Encrypt finds itself integrated by major players in the browser, operating system and cloud markets — including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and others.
The good news is that they are just getting started; Let’s Encrypt wants to make certificate renewal far easier for websites, especially in cases when the organization is forced to revoke a certificate when — for instance — a website’s server is compromised. This has happened quite a few times in the past, with Let’s Encrypt revoking more than three million certificates because of a bug in its domain validation and issuance software in March 2020. Also, in January of this year, it revoked millions of active certificates due to “irregularities” in the code.
The new specification for renewing certificates is “making its way through the IETF standards process so that the whole ecosystem can benefit, and we plan to deploy it in production at Let’s Encrypt shortly,” according to the ISRG executive director Josh Aas.
Ultimately, Let’s Encrypt’s goal is to bring the web up to a 100% encryption rate. And that’s a goal we’re wholeheartedly supporting…