Through the Internet Security Research Group, Mozilla Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Akamai Technologies, Electronic Frontier Foundation, IdenTrust, Inc., and University of Michigan researchers are looking to create a new free certificate authority. This CA has the goal of allowing TLS-protected communication, the successor to SSL, a certificate to be installed on a server in a one-click process.
The project is called Let’s Encrypt and it just launched yesterday. In their first blog post, they list their key principles behind the project:
- Free: Anyone who owns a domain can get a certificate validated for that domain at zero cost.
- Automatic: The entire enrollment process for certificates occurs painlessly during the server’s native installation or configuration process, while renewal occurs automatically in the background.
- Secure: Let’s Encrypt will serve as a platform for implementing modern security techniques and best practices.
- Transparent: All records of certificate issuance and revocation will be available to anyone who wishes to inspect them.
- Open: The automated issuance and renewal protocol will be an open standard and as much of the software as possible will be open source.
- Cooperative: Much like the underlying Internet protocols themselves, Let’s Encrypt is a joint effort to benefit the entire community, beyond the control of any one organization.
Right now, they are looking for sponsors and people willing to get involved.
When Let’s Encrypt goes live, it could be quite a force for securing our privacy on the web. The impact could be similar to CloudFlare implementing free SSL for their free customers.