n case you are not up to date, since April 2016 there has been a big change in the world of SSL certificates.
Mozilla, Akamai, Cisco and other big companies have joined forces and executed a new project called “Let’s encrypt” which offers to issue a free SSL certificate to everyone who needs it.
This is a huge event in the world of SSL certificates.
Website owners pay a lot of money in order to purchase SSL certificates issued by an authorized issuer (CA).
One of the main interests of every issuer is to be trusted by all web browsers (or at least all major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and IE). And for this purpose, issuers pay very large amounts of money. So the fact that an authorized issuer (Let’s encrypt) issues SSL certificates for free, is a really big thing.
Big money is involved here! So how come someone would want to issue free SSL certificates? What’s going on?
Let’s encrypt deeply believes in securing the internet and making it a safer place for all of us.
When we use the HTTP protocol, all of our internet activity is forwarded in clear-text, including credit card numbers! When using a physically secure link, such as a physical wire between two computers, this is not a problem. But when using WiFi for example, everyone who uses the same WiFi can theoretically see all of our traffic!
This is why SSL is so important. SSL secures HTTP and turns it into an HTTPS connection that encrypts our internet activity so that any sniffers or hackers that are monitoring traffic, have no idea what they are looking at!
For more information about how Let’s Encrypt SSL works, check out their article.
