Six-Day Certificates: Let’s Encrypt’s Next Step in Online Safety

The ISRG organization, which oversees the Let’s Encrypt project, has concluded the year by celebrating a record milestone—over 500 million websites now utilize its free TLS certificates. ISRG’s Executive Director, Josh Aas, reaffirmed the organization’s unwavering mission: to provide automated certificates that enhance the accessibility and security of the internet.

Next year, Let’s Encrypt will commemorate its decade of operation by introducing a new certificate format with a six-day validity period. This innovation aims to minimize potential risks in the event of key compromise, thereby fortifying the TLS ecosystem. Thanks to automated processes, most users will transition to the new format seamlessly.

For ISRG itself, this marks a significant challenge: scaling the infrastructure to accommodate the issuance of up to 100 million certificates daily. Josh Aas remarked that such ambitious objectives once seemed insurmountable, yet the team has consistently demonstrated its ability to overcome even the most daunting obstacles.

ISRG projects, like Let’s Encrypt, continue to transform the internet, making it safer for millions of users worldwide. These initiatives illustrate that even incremental advancements in encryption technology can have profound global implications for security.