According to the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), the nonprofit organization behind Let's Encrypt, the open certificate authority (CA) has issued three billion certificates so far this year.
See also: Let's Encrypt revokes 3 million certificates due to bug
The Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to improve communication between researchers and the Internet as a whole. The ISRG was founded in 2006 by a group of leading security researchers who saw the need for better information sharing in the field of cybersecurity.
Let's Encrypt has been providing websites free X.509 digital certificates required for HTTPS (SSL/TLS) and encrypted communications since September 2015, when it issued the first certificate for the domain name helloworld.letsencrypt.org.
As of August 2018, all major browsers, operating systems, and root certificate programs trust Let's Encrypt. This includes Microsoft, Google, Apple, Mozilla, Oracle, and Blackberry.
The free and automated CA allows any domain owner to obtain a trusted certificate quickly and at no cost. Currently, the CA says it issues millions of certificates every day.
Today, ISRG revealed that it has reached a new record, providing services to over 300 million websites.
See also: FBI: TikTok compromises the security of the United States
As of November 1, 2022, Let's Encrypt provided TLS to 309 million domains and 239 active certificates. Over the past year, ISRG noted that there was an increase of 33 million domains in the use of Let's Encrypt.
The CA operates at scale, and its development team is always looking for ways to automate certificate issuance and renewal. In early March 2020, the team was forced to revoke over 3 million certificates due to a bug in its domain validation and issuance software.
This number corresponded to approximately 2.6% of the active certificates it issued globally to 116 million websites in total.
In January 2022, Let's Encrypt announced that it would revoke millions of active SSL/TLS certificates. This decision affected approximately 1% of all active Let's Encrypt certificates at that time.
“We found a way to automate certificate renewal signals so that our subscribers can handle revocation/renewal events just as easily as certificates (it will happen automatically and they won’t even need to be there!),” said Josh Aas, executive director of ISRG.
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“The specification is currently undergoing the IETF standards process so it can be adopted by the entire ecosystem, and we plan to use it in production of Let's Encrypt soon.“.
Today's announcement breaks the previous record, after Let's Encrypt revealed in February 2020 that it had issued 1 billion certificates. This milestone was achieved less than three years after the announcement of 100 million certificates.
