Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has announced the release of its millionth free HTTPS certificate as part of the company’s ‘Let's Encrypt Certificate Authority’ concept.
Last year EFF, who co-founded Let's Encrypt CA with Mozilla and researchers from the University of Michigan, made public its aim of building a more secure future for the World Wide Web. This began with issuing and managing free certificates for any website that needs them, aiding in the transition from HTTP to the more secure HTTPS protocol on the web.
Now, just three months on from the first beta version of the service becoming available, the company has reached this significant landmark which shows they are living up to their promise of helping to ensure websites are more secure with better encryption.
What’s more, because a single certificate can cover more than one domain, the million certs Let’s Encrypt CA has issued are actually valid for 2.5 million fully-qualified domain names.
In a post on its website EFF said:
“It is clear that the cost and bureaucracy of obtaining certificates was forcing many websites to continue with the insecure HTTP protocol, long after we've known that HTTPS needs to be the default. We're very proud to be seeing that change, and helping to create a future in which newly provisioned websites are automatically secure and encrypted.”
In a statement to Infosecurity Brian Honan, Owner and CEO of BH Consulting, praised Let's Encrypt CA and said the initiative is helping to create a safer internet.
“This is a great milestone for Let’s Encrypt CA to reach, particularly as it has only relatively recently been available for general use. Hopefully the take up will continue and more and more companies and web sites will take this opportunity to protect their visitors’ privacy and improve their online security.”