Celebrating the First Certificate From Let’s Encrypt

Today we mark an important milestone in our march to encrypt all of the Web: the first-ever certificate issued by Let’s Encrypt.

Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, open-source certificate authority (CA). The goal is to revolutionize encryption on websites, making HTTPS implementation a seamless, no-cost option for anyone with a domain. Forget about hours (or sometimes days) of muddling through complicated programming to set up encryption on a website, or yearly fees. Let’s Encrypt puts security in the hands of website owners.

EFF has been working on Let’s Encrypt for several years—and it’s no simple feat. Launching a certificate authority can take hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more), a great deal of careful security work, a tremendous amount of paperwork, and a truly unconscionable number of early morning conference calls. Today marks the culmination of all that work, and the beginning of the process of rolling this service out to the broader public.

You can check out our first certificate on helloworld.letsencrypt.org.

Right now, the certificate is not cross-signed, so visiting the page over HTTPS will give you an “untrusted” warning unless you install the ISRG root in your trust store. Once the certificate is cross-signed by IdenTrust's root—probably in about a month—the trusted connection should work on nearly all browsers.

Anyone who cares deeply for Web security should be celebrating today. We extend our deepest gratitude to the many partners who have made this moment possible, and the 22,000 card-carrying EFF members who give us the resources to defend privacy and security online.

Learn more about Let’s Encrypt. Tweet a celebratory message. Rock out to a happy song about digital privacy.