Security WebPerf Letsencrypt Let’s Encrypt 2016 In Review

eva2000 · Jan 7, 2017

Letsencrypt posted a year in review for 2016 - their first year of operation

Our first full year as a live CA was an exciting one. I’m incredibly proud of what our team and community accomplished during 2016. I’d like to share some thoughts about how we’ve changed, what we’ve accomplished, and what we’ve learned.

At the start of 2016, Let’s Encrypt certificates had been available to the public for less than a month and we were supporting approximately 240,000 active (unexpired) certificates. That seemed like a lot at the time! Now we’re frequently issuing that many new certificates in a single day while supporting more than 20,000,000 active certificates in total. We’ve issued more than a million certificates in a single day a few times recently. We’re currently serving an average of 6,700 OCSP responses per second. We’ve done a lot of optimization work, we’ve had to add some hardware, and there have been some long nights for our staff, but we’ve been able to keep up and we’re ready for another year of strong growth.

We added a number of new features during the past year, including support for the ACME DNS challenge, ECDSA signing, IPv6, and Internationalized Domain Names.

When 2016 started, our root certificate had not been accepted into any major root programs. Today we’ve been accepted into the Mozilla, Apple, and Google root programs. We’re close to announcing acceptance into another major root program. These are major steps towards being able to operate as an independent CA. You can read more about why here.
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Interesting stats

Let’s Encrypt exists in order to help create a 100% encrypted Web. Our own metrics can be interesting, but they’re only really meaningful in terms of the impact they have on progress towards a more secure and privacy-respecting Web. The metric we use to track progress towards that goal is the percentage of page loads using HTTPS, as seen by browsers. According to Firefox Telemetry, the Web has gone from approximately 39% of page loads using HTTPS each day to just about 49% during the past year. We’re incredibly close to a Web that is more encrypted than not. We’re proud to have been a big part of that, but we can’t take credit for all of it. Many people and organizations around the globe have come to realize that we need to invest in a more secure and privacy-respecting Web, and have taken steps to secure their own sites as well as their customers’. Thank you to everyone that has advocated for HTTPS this year, or helped to make it easier for people to make the switch.
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Colin · Jan 11, 2017

My concern for rolling this to my main traffic sites was backwards compatibility. I posted a link to our test site and asked XP users specifically to test it. No one came back with any problems, they all said it ran fine. Digging it seems they had self selected not to use IE anymore. I've no doubt some corporate environments still enforce IE6 on XP, but it's not an issue I think to be held back by any longer for most sites.

That is one heck of a good starting year. I hope they can maintain it beyond there expectations, after all free isn't ever free for someone...

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