San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today released Certbot 1.0: a free, open source software tool to help websites encrypt their traffic and keep their sites secure.

Certbot was first released in 2015, and since then it has helped more than two million website administrators enable HTTPS by automatically deploying Let’s Encrypt certificates. Let’s Encrypt is a free certificate authority that EFF helped launch in 2015, now run for the public’s benefit through the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).

HTTPS is a huge upgrade in security from HTTP. For many years, web site owners chose to only implement HTTPS for a small number of pages, like those that accepted passwords or credit card numbers. However, in recent years, it has become clear that all web pages need protection. Pages served over HTTP are vulnerable to eavesdropping, content injection, and cookie stealing, which can be used to take over your online accounts.

“Securing your web browsing with HTTPS is an important part of protecting your information, like your passwords, web chats, and anything else you look at or interact with online,” said EFF Senior Software Architect Brad Warren. “However, Internet users can’t do this on their own—they need site administrators to configure and maintain HTTPS. That's where Certbot comes in. It automates this process to make it easy for everyone to run secure websites.”

Certbot is part of EFF’s larger effort to encrypt the entire Internet. Along with our browser add-on, HTTPS Everywhere, Certbot aims to build a network that is more structurally private, safe, and protected against censorship. The project is encrypting traffic to over 20 million websites, and has recently added beta support for Windows-based servers. Before the release of Let’s Encrypt and Certbot, only 40% of web traffic was encrypted. Now, that number is up to 80%.

“A secure web experience is important for everyone, but for years it was prohibitively hard to do,” said Max Hunter, EFF’s Engineering Director for Encrypting the Internet. “We are thrilled that Certbot 1.0 now makes it even easier for anyone with a website to use HTTPS.”

For more about Certbot:

https://certbot.eff.org/