As the interweb slowly moves over to HTTPS from the standard HTTP a new venture between Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mozilla, Cisco, the University of Michigan and IdenTrust has formed Lets Encrypt – a new authority out to attempt to completely eliminate the headaches and costs associated with the switch. See switching your website over to SSL has several concerns associated with it. First you need to buy the SSL certificate – which varying on your needs can get a bit pricey. Then that certificate needs to be configured on your server. Let’s Encrypt aims to offer a solution to both of these issues by providing free SSL certificates along with a software agent to minimize the time and effort needed to install and manage your certificates.
Lets Encrypt will be managed by the Internet Security Research Group, and there will be a strong focus on openness, ease and transparency. Certificates will be available to anyone with a domain, and the automated setup means that things can be up and running very quickly. The software behind the process will be open source, and the whole venture is as much about co-operation as it is about security — ease of use and compatibility
For now the tool is still in the development stages at the moment, but you can install it and provide feedback on how it works. Otherwise check out the below video for a demo. Lets Encrypt is expected to fully launch by next summer – so fingers crossed!