Let’s Encrypt: One more step on the road to TLS Everywhere

Principle 4 of the Mozilla Manifesto states: Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.

Unfortunately treating user security as optional is exactly what happens when sites let users connect over insecure HTTP rather than HTTP over TLS (HTTPS). What insecure means here is that your network traffic is totally unprotected and can be read and/or modified by anyone who shares a network with you, including random people sharing Starbucks or airport WiFi.

One of the biggest reasons that web sites don’t deploy TLS is the requirement to get a digital certificate — a cryptographic credential which allows a user’s browser to know it’s talking to the right site and not to an attacker. Certificates are issued by Certificate Authorities (CAs) often using a clumsy and error-prone manual process. A further disincentive to deployment is that  most CAs charge a fee for…