Let's Encrypt is a new Certificate Authority. It will provide free X509 certificates in an automated way, with close to no deployment overhead. Currently, requesting and deploying X509 certificates is a tedious and costly process - both in terms of vendor and labor costs. Our studies show that it often takes between 1 to 3 hours to go thorough the entire process of setting up HTTPs on a webserver. Let's Encrypt will reduce that time to a matter of minutes for the initial setup, and mere seconds for renewals.
William Budington is a Software Engineer at the EFF, where he works on Let's Encrypt as well as other technology projects. He's also a developer for SecureDrop, an anonymous document submission platform. As a crypto-enthusiast, he's taken part in the W3C Web Crypto Working Group and is excited to see the web grow as a platform for cryptographic applications. He loves hacker spaces and getting together with other techies to tinker, code, share, and build the technological commons.