Let’s Encrypt has issued a million free SSL certificates

After just over three months, the Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority has issued its millionth SSL certificate. Since the certificates can serve multiple domain names, the number of domain names that can now be accessed via https is much higher.

The public issuance of certificates started in early December with an open beta and the number has now passed the million. Incidentally, Let’s Encrypt’s own statistics page still shows a number of just under a million, but a search for certificates does yield that number. The total number of domain names served by the Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority is now over 2.5 million.

Moreover, for ninety percent these are domain names that were previously not accessible via https with a browser, writes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the initiators. With a number of 23,695 at the time of writing, .nl domain names account for 2.25 percent of the total. The .be domain names are not specified in the overview; ‘other’ has an equal share with .com at 24 percent.

It already seemed clear that the project would become popular. In the closed beta, 26,000 certificates were quickly distributed and the attention is worldwide. The aim of the initiative is to give as many sites as possible https support by providing free SSL certificates and making implementation easier. In addition to the EFF, Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust and researchers from the University of Michigan are working on the Encrypt the Web project.