One of the projects that I was following quite a lot in the year of 2016 was LetsEncrypt Its purpose is to provide free certificates for anyone who wanted to add it to their website.
It used to be that in order to encrypt communication between a web browser and a website you had to buy a certificate. This caused many web pages to not have the famous padlock in the browser that indicates that the communication is "secure".
The padlock does NOT indicate that the page is secure. The only thing it indicates is that the data you send from your browser to that page will be very unlikely to be intercepted and decrypted by a third party. But anyone can put the padlock on their site buying a certificate or using a free one.
LetsEncrypt started in 2015 to launch its first free certificates and currently provides 260 million certificates for web pages, increasing the percentage of padlocked sites quite a lot.
Key Features.
Free: Anyone who owns a domain name can use Let's Encrypt to get a trusted certificate at no cost.
Automatic: A program running on a web server can interact with Let's Encrypt to easily obtain a certificate, configure it securely for use, and automatically take care of renewal.
Secure: Let's Encrypt will serve as a platform for advancing TLS security best practices, both on the CA side and helping web site operators secure their servers properly.
Transparent: All certificates issued or revoked will be publicly recorded and available for anyone to inspect.
Open: The automatic issuance and renewal protocol will be published as an open standard for others to adopt.
Cooperative: Like the underlying Internet protocols themselves, Let's Encrypt is a joint effort for the benefit of the community, beyond the control of any one organization.
Visit the LetsEncrypt website so you can install the certificates on your site. Using https also helps you rank higher in search engines like google, bing, duckduckgo, etc.
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