Let’s Encrypt CA to issue its first cert

Let’s Encrypt, a non-profit certificate authority (CA) set up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan, is finally ready to issue its first certificate, scheduled for the week of July 27, 2015.

“We will issue the first end entity certificates under our root under tightly controlled circumstances. No cross-signature will be in place yet, so the certificates will not validate unless our root is installed in client software,” explained Josh Aas, the Executive Director of the Internet Security Research Group, which runs the CA.

“As we approach general availability we will issue more and more certificates, but only for a pre-approved set of domains. This limited issuance period will give us time to further ensure that our systems are secure, compliant, and scalable.”

General availability is scheduled for the third week of September, when certificate requests for any domain can be gotten. “A cross-signature from IdenTrust will be in place for general availability, so that our certificates will validate automatically for the vast majority of consumers,” he added.

The CA’s root and intermediate certificates have been generated earlier this month, and the security audit of the its software and Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol has obviously come to a satisfactory end.

Let’s Encrypt’s goal is to make the process of switching webservers from HTTP to HTTPS quick and easy.

More information about the CA can be found here.