Let's Encrypt Free SSL Certification Service Announces Forecast of 'How Popular HTTPS in 2019'

by Sean MacEntee

" Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)" is the communication protocol for sending and receiving data on websites that exist in myriad of websites on the Internet. In order to make this HTTP communication safer, "HTTPS" is the mechanism, and to adopt it is necessary to issue "server certificate" to prove that it is a reliable site. Let's Encrypt, which issues this certificate for free, summarizes the data on the adoption of HTTPS adoption.

Looking Forward to 2019 - Let's Encrypt - Free SSL / TLS Certificates
https://letsencrypt.org/2018/12/31/looking-forward-to-2019.html

The importance of HTTPS to increase the security of communication is increasing, activities other than Let's Encrypt to encourage its dissemination are taking place. For example, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox in web browsers are designed to communicate HTTPS by notifying users when communicating with unencrypted HTTP.

Google announces policy to remove "Protected communication" indication from Chrome in the future when connecting to HTTPS - GIGAZINE

With this move, it can be said that the introduction of HTTPS is steadily proceeding. A graph showing the number of supported certificates and unique domains showing the penetration of HTTPS is as follows. The dotted line of Orange is the number of issued certificates, the number of fully qualified domains where blue solid lines are effective, and the number of domains where green dotted lines are registered, it is clearly understood that all have continued to increase from January 2016 I will. According to Let's Encrypt, in 2019 root certificates are expected to grow to over 120 million, fully qualified domains will grow to more than 215 million.

The CA infrastructure of Let's Enclypt has redundancy to ensure stability and physical and logical security protection and can issue millions of certificates per day. Let's Enclypt predicts that by about 40% increase in 2019, signing the certificate in response to approximately 40 million OCSPs every day, and responding about 5.5 billion times a day.

The Let's Enclypt infrastructure consists of a total of approximately 55 units of rack space divided into two data centers. Also, it is managed by the site reliability engineering (SRE) team consisting of only six people, and by the end of 2019 the number of users will finally increase, so that regular investment is required for the database server equipment Let's Enclypt says.

Originally it is a server certificate issued for a fee by various security companies, but Let's Enclypt is issued free of charge. Let's Enclypt has a budget of only 3.6 million dollars (about 390 million yen), but with various sponsors such as Cisco , OVH , Mozilla, Google Chrome, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and many other users can donate It is said that it is. In 2019 I was going to continue to recruit additional sponsors and donations in order to continue activities.