Researched
Encrypted Web (Let's Encrypt)
Free, automated certificates from Let's Encrypt (first issued September 2015) pushed encrypted HTTPS from a minority of web traffic to about 80% worldwide.
Open in the interactive tree →Let's Encrypt, announced in November 2014, issued its first publicly trusted certificate on 14 September 2015. It issued its millionth certificate in March 2016, reached a million certificates a day in September 2018 and its billionth in 2020; it is now the largest certificate authority by volume, issuing ten million certificates a day by September 2025. By its own Firefox data, encrypted page loads rose from well under half in 2015 to about 80% worldwide and about 95% in the US by late 2025.
Prerequisites
- Public-Key Cryptography1976
- World Wide Web1991
- SSL/TLS secure connections1995Let's Encrypt makes TLS certificates free and automatic
Unlocks
- Digital Identity & TrustopenDigital identity schemes rely on the same certificate infrastructure that secures the web