The Internet Security Research Group (ISRT) along with Mozilla Corporation, Cisco Systems, Akamai Tech, Electronic Frontier Foundation and IdenTrust will be offering a new free certificate authority service this up coming 2015 summer (learn more HERE). The concept is the Internet is a dangerous place and enabling protection is a hassle for many businesses. The reason behind this is enabling basic server certificates can be painful involving multiple steps and a cost. Lets Encrypt is offering the following principles to simplify the process.
- 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.
This isn’t the answer to stoping many attacks seen on the web such as phishing, DDoS, exploiting web services, etc. It is however a great step in helping all administrators regardless of size, skills or finical shape have an opportunity to enable basic server certificates. I personally like how I will be able to leverage this for my lab tools that require certificates over using self signed certificates. This isn’t live just yet but sounds pretty awesome.
Learn more at https://letsencrypt.org/
