Let's Encrypt: There are many who in 2020 have their own blog. Some have movement, and others simply exist more to meet the expression needs of the owner. Be that as it may, all today's blogs and in general today's websites have a common feature.
It is called Let's Encrypt and deals with the security of the transfer and transmission of information.
Below we will see how the idea of the Let's Encrypt service started and how it managed to reach one billion certificates a few years after its launch.
Let's start from the beginning:
Let's Encrypt is a certificate authority (CA), which enables you to generate free SSL certificates for your domain (your website).
It is an open certificate authority run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) και χρηματοδοτείται από τις Mozilla και Automattic. Έχει σαν στόχο να εξοπλίσει τους νόμιμους ιστότοπους κάθε μεγέθους και operation with SSL/TLS certificates, which help them browsers accept and serve encrypted data to ensure that users' activities and transactions are intercepted.
Their first certificate was issued in September 2015 and has been immediately signed by the SSL certificate provider IdenTrust.
Let's Encrypt started issuing certificates in November 2015. The move has helped a lot of websites adopt HTTPS encryption and climb higher rankings in searching results of Google.
The soul of Let's Encrypt is Josh Aas, who sometime a few years ago had a vision. Google at the time, had announce the change of its algorithm. The new algorithm would reward sites that used the Stronger Security Protocol (HTTPS).
Κανένα πρόβλημα, σκέφτηκε ο Josh Aas. Η διαδρομή προς τον στόχο ενός ασφαλούς διαδικτύου απαιτούσε την τυποποίηση μιας νέας προδιαγραφής HTTP (το HTTP/2) που περιείχε το Transport Layer Security (TLS). Αυτό όμως παρουσίαζε ένα άλλο πρόβλημα: Για να γίνει αυτό πραγματικότητα, ο Aas έπρεπε να εκδώσει δωρεάν δισmillions ψηφιακά πιστοποιητικά σε ιστότοπους προκειμένου να ενεργοποιηθεί το HTTPS (SSL/TLS).
So Josh Aas quit his job at Mozilla in 2012 and started Let's Encrypt. Today, about 85% of all websites use HTTPS and over a billion certificates have been issued.
All this eight years after the first idea. Josh's new work seems to be paying off for companies to trust Let's Encrypt certificates. His company operates with maximum transparency, and even has the source code of the service open to everyone (GitHub).
Let's Encrypt works fully with the community. According to Aas, The community helps to management of forums, develops the Let's Encrypt website code (also open source), and develops the client-software for everyone to use Let's Encrypt.
Eventually it seemed like everyone wanted to secure their pages, but they needed an easy and free way to do it. LE, offers easy and free encryption for everyone, while supporting standard and well-documented APIs that make life very easy for all administrators.
Of course, Aas in 2015 did not expect such a development. The fact that 85% of the World Wide Web is now secure is a major victory for privacy and security.
