10 Years of Let's Encrypt
231 comments
·December 9, 2025jjice
btown
To be fair, for a CEO in 2022, EV certificates had only lost their special visualizations since September/October 2019 with Chrome 77 and Firefox 70 - and with all that would happen in the following months, one could be forgiven for not adapting to new browser best practices!
https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-ar...
charlesbarbier
It was a red herring the entire time. At Shopify we made experiment regarding conversion between regular certs and EV before they stop being displayed and there was no significant difference. The users don't notice the absence of the fancier green lock.
yabones
Call me old-school, but I really liked how EV certs looked in the browser. Same with the big green lock icon Firefox used to have. I know it's all theatrics at best and a scam at worst, but I really feel like it's a bit of a downgrade.
gerdesj
"it's all theatrics at best"
Only IT understand any of this SSL/TLS stuff and we screwed up the messaging. The message has always been somewhat muddled and that will never work efficiently.
woleium
it’s okay, the scam continues with BIMI
wnevets
> Call me old-school, but I really liked how EV certs looked in the browser.
I agree, making EV Certs visually more important makes sense to people who know what it means and what it doesn't. Too bad they never made it an optional setting.
smurda
I loved the visualization of EV certs in browsers, but in 2014 vendors like GoDaddy charged $100/yr for them. https://web.archive.org/web/20131023033903/http://www.godadd...
I'm glad LE, browsers, and others like Cloudflare brought this cost to $0. Eliminating this unnecessary cost is good for the internet.
unethical_ban
EV validated not only that a domain was under control of the server requesting the cert, but that the domain was under control of the entity claiming it.
I kind of wish they still had it, and I kind of wish browsers indicated that a cert was signed by a global CA (real cert store trusted by the browsers) or an aftermarket CA, so people can see that their stuff is being decrypted by their company.
tadfisher
Problem is, I can easily set up a company and get an EV cert for "FooBar Technologies, LLC" and phish customers looking for "FooBar Incorporated" or "International FooBar Corp.". Approximately zero users know the actual entity name of the real FooBar.
arccy
you can find quite of few examples online that the entity check wasn't all that strict...
qwertox
I once notified Porsche that one of their websites had an expired certificate, they fixed it within a couple of hours by using Let's Encrypt. It surprised me.
Let's Encrypt is to the internet what SSDs are to the PC. A level up.
quesera
There was a time when EV certificates were considered more trustworthy than DV certs. Browsers used to show an indication for EV certs.
Those days are long gone, and I'm not completely sure how I feel about it. I hated the EV renewal/rotation process, so definitely a win on the day-to-day scale, but I still feel like something was lost in the transition.
hk1337
This was the only objection I had gotten about using letsencrypt 6 years ago but that guy is gone and now we either have letsencrypt or AWS certificates
trueismywork
What about OV?
ekr____
It's never been clear to me what the rationale for OV was, as the UI wasn't even different like EV was.
quesera
I've never seen (noticed) an OV cert in real life, and no business I've ever been responsible for pushed for OV over DV. It was always EV or "huh?"
hk1337
The only pain point I had using letsencrypt, and it wasn 100% not their fault, was I tried using it to generate the certificate to use with FTPS authentication with a vendor. Since LE expires every 90 days and the vendor emails you every week when you’re 2 months from expiring, that became a pain point and it wasn’t easier to just by a 1 or 2 year cert from godaddy. Thank goodness that vendor moved to sftp with key authentication so none of that is needed anymore
johnebgd
There are extended certificates that did matter in our sales process for some hosted solutions back about 15 years ago if I recall right… no one has ever cared since…
rokkamokka
No! Let's encrypt is easily the best thing that's happened for a secure internet the last 10 years.
winternett
Many host providers (Those acquired by companies like Web.Com, allegedly) disable all ability to use outside certs since Google made encryption a requirement in Chrome Browser...
They do things like blocking containers & SSH to make installing free certs impossible.
They also have elevated the price of their own certs (that they can conveniently provide) to ridiculous prices in contrast to free certs their customers can't even use...
It would be a huge price-fixing scandal if Congress had any idea of how technology works.
Sohcahtoa82
There are literally thousands of web hosts out there. If your web host is doing something shitty like that, it's trivial to find a new one.
selcuka
> It would be a huge price-fixing scandal if Congress had any idea of how technology works.
It's shady, but technically not price-fixing unless they are a monopoly. You are free to take your business to somewhere else.
accrual
Seconding the effect of Let's Encrypt on the world of TLS. I remember getting into web applications in the late 2000s and rolling my own certificates/CA and it was a huge, brittle pain. Now it's just another deployment checkbox thanks to LE.
pedrozieg
It’s easy to forget how awful TLS was before Let’s Encrypt: you’d pay per-hostname, file tickets, manually validate domains, and then babysit a 1-year cert renewal calendar. Today it’s basically “install an ACME client once and forget it” and the web quietly shifted from <30% HTTPS to ~80% globally and ~95% in the US in a few years.
The impressive bit isn’t just the crypto, it’s that they attacked the operational problem: automation (ACME), good client ecosystem, and a nonprofit CA that’s fine with being invisible infrastructure. A boring, free cert became the default.
The next 10 years feel harder: shrinking lifetimes (45-day certs are coming) means “click to install cert” can’t exist anymore, and there’s still a huge long tail of internal dashboards, random appliances, and IoT gear that don’t have good automation hooks. We’ve solved “public websites on Linux boxes,” but not “everything else on the network.”
cortesoft
Just a few months ago my company was going through some transitions and wanted to get some certs to cover us while we migrated to a different stack with let's encrypt and automated cert renewals.
We had some legacy systems on our network that needed certs and had various subdomains that prevented us from just having a wildcard cert. It ended up that we needed a few dozen subdomains with wildcard certs for each, and it was all for internal traffic between them.
The company we were using wanted to charge us $30,000 for a one year cert with that many wildcards.
We said fuck that, created our own CA, generated a big wildcard cert, and then installed the CA on the few thousand servers as a trusted root. A few months later and we are just using let's encrypt for everything, for free.
I can't believe there is a market for $30,000 certs anymore. We were just shocked that that was deemed a reasonable price to charge us.
electroly
Both Let's Encrypt and 3-year certificates were introduced in 2015. We had 5+ year certificates before that. At the time you'd buy the longest certificate possible and forget about it--that's what I did. In 2013 I bought a 5-year certificate (self-service, no tickets) and didn't think about it again until 2018.
vbezhenar
My experience was: get 3-year certificate for free, install it and forget about it. With LetsEncrypt, it's always pain, expired websites everywhere. Too bad that american IT mafia put these good CA out of business.
jojomodding
I was about to say that I never encounter TLS errors while browsing, but that's not strictly true. There is one such website, and it's only because the webmaster had a stroke and can't maintain it currently. But apart from that rather sad story I can't relate to your issues at all.
selcuka
I agree. I don't remember the last time I saw an expired cert, and it was probably an abandoned web site (which would eventually expire even with a 3-year certificate as well). At least with Let's Encrypt you have to automate it.
simcop2387
For IoT myself i'm wondering if it's something that could be thrown into the Matter side of things, make the hub/border router act as an ACME server with it's own CA that gives out mTLS certs so the devices can validate the hub and the hub can validate the devices. It'd never be implemented properly by the swarms of cheap hardware out there but I can dream...
kbolino
But why?
There's no reliable source of truth for your home network. Neither the local (m)DNS nor the IP addresses nor the MAC addresses hold any extrinsic meaning. You could certainly run the standard ACME challenges, but neither success nor failure would carry much weight.
And then the devices themselves have no way of knowing your hub/router/AP is legitimate. You'd have to have some way of getting the CA certificate on to them that couldn't be easily spoofed.
EDIT: There is a draft for a new ACME challenge called dns-persist-01, which mentions IoT, but I'm not really sure how it helps that use case exactly: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-acme-dns-pe...
asim
As a sysadmin in the 2007-2011 timeframe I literally used openssl to generate csrs, went to godaddy to purchase SSL certificates and then manually deployed them to servers. Man what a world of change. Let's encrypt is one the best services we've had on the internet. I wish we had more things like this.
Ayesh
It's been a long time so this is my fading memory, but CAs used to generate a private key on their end and let you download both private key and the certificate containing the public key. The non-technical person who paid big money for the certificate then emails the zip file to the developer. That's when StartTLS wasn't that big back then either.
Just comically bad way to obtain certs.
noAnswer
Would be cool to have it for S/MIME too.
amatecha
Ah man, I remember those days. So tedious!
par
i was doing this until a couple years back when a friend told me about LetsEncrypt! It's like magic!!
ok123456
Snowden was the other big reason that TLS became the de facto standard for every site.
Prior to that, the consensus was that you only really needed TLS if you were dealing with money and wasn't worth the hassle otherwise. You could sniff traffic from Facebook and Twitter easily.
I remember listening to a talk given by an IRS investigator in around 2008 about how they were able to do a sting and shutdown illegal internet casinos. They collected a good bulk of that evidence from clear-text packet captures of gambling sessions and messages. He preemptively answered the question of whether encryption was a hurdle, by saying no one used it.
tptacek
This is a retcon. Facebook rolled out TLS in 2011, 2 years before Snowden, and went TLS-by-default within a month of the Snowden disclosures. Google Mail was TLS-by-default in 2010. TLS was a universal best practice long before 2013 --- by 2010, you'd have gotten a sev:hi vulnerability flagged on your site if you hadn't implemented TLS. SSLLabs was 2009; BEAST was 2011, and was a huge global news story because of how widely deployed TLS was.
schoen
I think you're right that this consensus was clearly emerging then (I remember Firesheep in 2010 as another big identifiable contributing factor), but I remember actively asking smaller sites to enable HTTPS in that era, and they would often refuse. So I think Snowden also contributed to the spread of the norm.
It is possible that there's a retcon element, because it's not always clear in my memory exactly what year various sites became more favorably disposed towards the request to use HTTPS. So I could be misremembering some of them as agreeing post-Snowden when they'd actually agreed one year before, or something.
tptacek
I think it would be a stretch to say that Snowden did nothing to accelerate the uptake; for better and worse he clearly did. But he didn't set it into motion; we were going to have an all-TLS Internet within a decade with or without him.
8organicbits
I'm not sure that refutes the idea that encryption was uncommon. A couple tech giants with challenging threat models will be ahead of the curve.
Google started tracking adoption of TLS in 2015, with adoption below 50% and some regions below 30%.
ok123456
Yes. And I remember sniffing Facebook traffic in clear text in 2011. The fact remains that it was considered a significant engineering problem for them to deploy it. It was a "best practice" that most people rolled their eyes at.
Most users and system owners didn't care unless money was being transacted.
Between Snowden and ISPs injecting content into pages, the consensus changed.
tptacek
The consensus obviously changed. It's just that it changed years before the Snowden leaks.
12_throw_away
I think it was a lot earlier than 2013 - SSL was inevitable by the late 2000's, as soon as major ISPs decided they could make more money by injecting ads into http connections (e.g., [1]). It obviously took a while for the infrastructure to scale up ... but I'd imagine that concerns about stolen ad impressions drove a lot more HTTPS adoption than concerns about the NSA.
joshstrange
I still remember the original announcement around LE and thought "Great idea, no idea if they'll be able to get buy-in from browsers/etc", now I use it on all my self-hosted sites and will probably be transitioning my employer over to it when we switch to automated renewal sometime next year.
LE has been an amazing resource and every time I setup a new website and get a LE cert I smile. Especially after having lived/experienced the pain that was SSL/TLS before LE.
vadepaysa
LetsEncrypt is on my end of year Donate list for the past 5 years. With all modern browsers requiring HTTPS everywhere, a world without Let's Encrypt would be really difficult for indie developers.
Thank You for an amazing product!
t1234s
Lets hope they stay independent and never get acquired by Google or any other large tech company. You can imagine a web where SSL issuance is used as a tool to censor websites. I think most browsers have been made to make standard http sites look malicious to normal users.
mikeyouse
They're a nonprofit - so they can't be acquired like a typical for-profit company. They could in theory sell some assets but it'd be very convoluted if they were the core assets -- per US tax law, nonprofit assets must remain in the nonprofit world, so there's no risk of any tech company ruining them.
xandrius
I heard similar things about another American nonprofit and now I'm not so sure about it. When money and will comes along, loopholes come as well.
So, I wouldn't be so sure, unfortunately.
crapple8430
If Google wants to censor your website, they have a variety of other, more effective methods, like by adding it to their safe browsing blacklist, which is also used in many Firefox installs.
morshu9001
Or even more apples to apples, they could ignore your cert in Chrome
Ayesh
As someone else mentioned, it's a non-profit, so I guess it's not technically possible to get acquired.
But I personally believe that the people behind LetsEncrypt genuinely care about the mission and will never sell out for their personal benefit.
If there was a list of organizations that bring the most impactful things to tech per each dollar received in donations and per each employee, ISRG will be up there at the top.
null
greyface-
New baseline expectation that web traffic will be encrypted on the wire: very good!
New de-facto requirement that you need to receive the blessing of a CA to make use of basic web platform features... not so good.
ekr____
Can you elaborate a bit about what you mean by "the blessing of a CA"?
I agree that it's true that you need a certificate to do TLS, but importantly Let's Encrypt isn't interested in what you do with your certificate, just that you actually control the domain name. See: https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/29/phishing-and-malware.html
greyface-
Their policy today is to grant certificates liberally. There is no technical guarantee that this remains the case indefinitely, only a political one. I don't doubt the sincerity of this guarantee, but I wish I didn't have to rely on it.
crote
A big factor is that they are serving so many certs, with only a tiny amount of funding. Anything beyond the most basic pre-written list of blocked domain names is infeasible. Analyzing the content of every single domain would increase their resource needs by several orders of magnitude. That's reasonably close to a technical guarantee, if you ask me.
ekr____
I agree that technical guarantees are better than policy guarantees.
jovial_cavalier
That's not new, LetsEncrypt just didn't solve it. And if you think this is the only single point of failure in the stack, I have news for you.
greyface-
It's absolutely new. No HTML5 features were restricted to secure origins only pre-LE. Today, many are. Google was able to push these requirements in large part due to Let's Encrypt's success making secure origins ubiquitous.
ekr____
The order of events is a bit more complicated than this.
Google initially proposed restricting powerful features to secure origins back in February of 2015 (https://web.archive.org/web/20150125103531/https://www.chrom...) and Mozilla proposed requiring secure origins for all new features in April of 2015 (https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/04/30/deprecating-non...). Let's Encrypt issued its first certificate in September of 2015.
This isn't to say that these two things are unrelated: Mozilla obviously knew about Let's Encrypt and we considered it an important complement for this kind of policy, and at least some people at Chrome knew about LE, though I'm not sure how it played into their thinking. However, it's not as simple as "LE happened and then people started pushing for secure origins for new features".
unethical_ban
Kinda hear you, but DNS is a defacto requirement as well. Neither DNS (common TLDs) nor any of the major cert vendors I'm aware of ask you your site's business before issuing.
charcircuit
>ask you your site's business before issuing.
Because they want your money. If they ask you after they get to keep your money.
stego-tech
Let’s Encrypt is something so amazingly valuable that I was certain it’d be killed dead within a year to prop up the existing SSL cert business.
Congrats on a decade, ya’ll, here’s to many, many more in securing the free internet.
npodbielski
I am glad to be one of the users using that for around 7 years. I can't think of how much better is life of people just doing blogs or some silly websites with free https certs. Would I pay 50$ bucks a year for ability to self host nextcloud? Probably not. But security enhancement is so enormous with that service. Thanks to everyone involved for making world a little bit better.
Decoy1008
I am so grateful for this. Bummer that they stopped with the email reminder, anyways I was wondering how this would work without active payments. Still amazing.
callumgare
Out of interest why do you care? I assume you’re using acme to automate renewals. Is it in case that fails? Or do you work with some system that can’t be automated?
omani
only downside to LE is the attack surface presented by CTLs (Certificate Transparency Logs). as soon as you request a cert, you will get attacks on the endpoint/subdomain you have registered by countless IPs trying to login etc.
Let's Encrypt was _huge_ in making it's absurd to not have TLS and now we (I, at least) take it for granted because it's just the baseline for any website I build. Incredible, free service that helped make the web a more secure place. What a wonderful service - thank you to the entire team.
The CEO at my last company (2022) refused to use Let's Encrypt because "it looked cheap to customers". That is absurd to me because 1), it's (and was at the time) the largest certificate authority in the world, and 2) I've never seen someone care about who issued your cert on a sales call. It coming from GoDaddy is not a selling point...
So my question: has anyone actually commented to you in a negative way about using Let's Encrypt? I couldn't imagine, but curious on others' experiences.