For years, EFF has been working to protect the Web from surveillance and censorship by making encryption ubiquitous. Fixing problems with the Internet's certificate infrastructure has been at the top of that list.

Last night, that campaign took a major step forward when the Let's Encrypt Certificate Authority, which we've been building in collaboration with teams at Mozilla and ISRG (and a lot of help from Akamai, Cisco, and others) received a cross-signature from IdentTrust. As a result, Let's Encrypt certificates are now valid and trusted by all modern Web browsers. You can see our very first cert in action at helloworld.letsencrypt.org.

Over the next month or so, we will be incrementally sending beta invitations to the folks who have requested to participate in the beta program. When you get a beta email invite, Let's Encrypt will whitelist issuance of certificates for the domains you requested. We intend to transition to an open beta (no invites required) in mid to late November.