Let's Encrypt: An Open Source Project To Encrypt The Entire Web

Jeremy Gillula, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

Setting up an encrypted (HTTPS) website can be a challenging task for anyone who's not a professional sysadmin. Not only do you have to first obtain a certificate from a Certificate Authority (which can sometimes cost several hundreds of dollars), you then have to figure out how to properly configure it on your system. For a professional sysadmin this process can take over an hour; for an amateur who just wants to run their website in a secure way, it can be baffling to the point of impossible. And either way, it's easy to make simple configuration mistakes that will dramatically decrease the security of your site. Let's Encrypt is a joint project between the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Akami, Cisco, and open-source developers around the world, to fix this. Let's Encrypt is a free, automated Certificate Authority which anyone can use to quickly and automatically setup HTTPS on their web server. In this talk, I'll give a quick background on how the HTTPS and certificate infrastructure works, what technical challenges Let's Encrypt will address, and how it will do so.