1 million free SSL certificates to ease private conversations

1 million free TLS/SSL certificates have been issued to protect communications between users and web servers, the EFF writes.

The Let’s Encrypt certificate authority reached this milestone within three months of the program launching its beta version. Its goal was to offer free HTTPS certificates as easily as possible to help secure web server communications. SSL is used by many businesses to protect sensitive data, such as credit card information, passwords, legal documents or confidential emails exchanged between a browser and a server.

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation

“Much more work remains to be done before the Internet is free from insecure protocols, but this is substantial and rapid progress,” the certificate authority said.

The program encourages wider adoption of encryption as SSL/TLS certificates cost hundreds of dollars, depending on their type, and need to be renewed periodically.

“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,” the authority said.

A single certificate can cover multiple domain names, so 1 million certificates are actually valid for 2.5 million domain names.

The Let’s Encrypt CA was co-founded by Mozilla and researchers from the University of Michigan and is now supported by large organizations like Akamai and Cisco.