Amazon wants to become a certificate authority

Amazon Web Services applied to Mozilla and the Android Open Source Project on Monday to become a certificate authority. This allows Amazon to sell SSL certificates to developers.

GeekWire writes this on the basis of the applications submitted to Mozilla and Android. It’s unclear what the profits will be for Amazon and how aggressively the company will market the certificates, but it seems like a logical addition to Amazon Web Services’ portfolio, AWS. With their own certificate authority, developers no longer have to request an SSL certificate through another provider.

The publicly visible requests from Mozilla and Android show that Amazon wants to offer users both a standard and an extensive package. Also, applicants for certificates from Amazon do not need to use domain registration through Amazon or other company services to apply the certificates. This year, a consortium of the EFF, Mozilla and Akamai will also launch its own certificate authority: Let’s Encrypt.

At the end of July 2014, Amazon started offering domain name registration. The AWS web console must be used for this. It is not yet known how exactly that will work with the SSL certificates.