Celebrating 10 Years of Building a Better Internet

“ISRG has significantly enhanced the security and privacy of the Internet for users all over the world, through its Let’s Encrypt certificate authority. Today, we almost take for granted that websites will use HTTPS to protect our interactions…Let’s Encrypt was a game-changer for Internet security.”

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Christine Runnegar

Board Chair, ISRG & Senior Director of Internet Trust, Internet Society

“Congratulations to ISRG on its tenth anniversary and for the growth of its Let's Encrypt program. As the Internet increases in importance to our daily lives, security has become essential and ISRG is a vital part of providing it.”

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Vint Cerf

VP and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

“We want to see privacy preserving metrics used everywhere, by default, not just for metrics that are considered to be sensitive. Sometimes metrics can reveal personal information even if they don't appear to be sensitive.”

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Window Snyder

Founder & CEO, Thistle Technologies

“The people at ISRG have been helping protect the Internet for over ten years, and continue to protect us all. They're a necessary part of #CyberCivilDefense and national security.”

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Craig Newmark

Founder, craigslist

“EFF is so proud that we had a role in creating and fostering ISRG. We have been delighted to see it grow into such a strong and vital organization. Quite simply, Let’s Encrypt has improved the safety and security of everyone who relies on the internet. Not many organizations can say that, much less ones that are only 10 years old. We’re proud and we know our friend Peter Eckersley – who we all lost too soon – would be proud too. Cheers and congratulations!”

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Cindy Cohn

Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation

“Paramount to ensuring the Internet continues to be the most fundamental tool to connect, learn, and express, is the notion that the Web be free and open, safe and privacy-respecting.”

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Vicky Chin

ISRG Board Member & Director of Desktop Product Development, Mozilla

“Thanks to the ISRG's efforts, the internet is becoming a safer place for everyone… ISRG has shown its commitment to its mission by initiating new projects like Prossimo and Divvi Up, which focus on enhancing user privacy and the security of digital communications beyond just encryption. These projects are a testament to the organization’s dedication to making the internet a safer place for all of us. We should all be grateful for the work done by this amazing team and the progress they have made in securing the internet.”

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Pascal Jaillon

ISRG Board Member & SVP, Product & Digital Accounts, OVHcloud

“Creating a new kind of certificate authority that gives out free certificates was a crazy idea…we had to prove that the economics would work, and there was no way to do that except to just build it.”

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Alex Halderman

ISRG Co-Founder, Board Member & Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan

“Vision combined with execution can make a big impact in the world, and ISRG has done just that!”

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Alex Polvi

ISRG Former Board Member & Founder, CoreOS

“By democratizing SSL certificates, Let's Encrypt has played an essential role in creating more safety and privacy on the web. Kudos!”

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Ondrej Vlcek

President, Gen

“We have supported Let's Encrypt since the very beginning. It is very valuable and important that nowadays any website can be equipped with an SSL certificate free of charge.”

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Markus Gebert

Co-Founder & CEO, Hostpoint

“The certificate system is a great example of an Internet infrastructure that puts to use real world trust relationships towards a functioning technical trust ‘anchor.’ Billions of people access the Internet with less censorship and surveillance because Let's Encrypt hastened the adoption of web security measures by making certificates easy to obtain.”

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Mallory Knodel

Chief Technology Officer, Center for Democracy & Technology

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Christine Runnegar

Board Chair, ISRG & Senior Director of Internet Trust, Internet Society

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Vint Cerf

VP and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

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Window Snyder

Founder & CEO, Thistle Technologies

“The people at ISRG have been helping protect the Internet for over ten years, and continue to protect us all. They're a necessary part of #CyberCivilDefense and national security.”

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Craig Newmark

Founder, craigslist

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Cindy Cohn

Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation

“Paramount to ensuring the Internet continues to be the most fundamental tool to connect, learn, and express, is the notion that the Web be free and open, safe and privacy-respecting.”

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Vicky Chin

ISRG Board Member & Director of Desktop Product Development, Mozilla

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Pascal Jaillon

ISRG Board Member & SVP, Product & Digital Accounts, OVHcloud

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Alex Halderman

ISRG Co-Founder, Board Member & Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan

“Vision combined with execution can make a big impact in the world, and ISRG has done just that!”

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Alex Polvi

ISRG Former Board Member & Founder, CoreOS

“By democratizing SSL certificates, Let's Encrypt has played an essential role in creating more safety and privacy on the web. Kudos!”

—

Ondrej Vlcek

President, Gen

“We have supported Let's Encrypt since the very beginning. It is very valuable and important that nowadays any website can be equipped with an SSL certificate free of charge.”

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Markus Gebert

Co-Founder & CEO, Hostpoint

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Mallory Knodel

Chief Technology Officer, Center for Democracy & Technology

A look back at highlights from our first 10 years

2013

ISRG Founded

ISRG was founded in May of 2013 by Josh Aas and Eric Rescorla as a home for public benefit digital infrastructure. Josh and Eric were later joined by Alex Halderman and Peter Eckersley, who were at the time developing a protocol for automatically issuing and renewing certificates. These combined efforts were the genesis of Let’s Encrypt. The four started ISRG as a nonprofit, hoping that nonprofit governance requirements would keep the organization transparent and reliable in the long term.ISRG was founded thanks in part to early sponsors and partners Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Akamai, Cisco, and the University of Michigan.

2015

Let’s Encrypt Project Launched

After two years of hard work, ISRG launched its flagship project Let’s Encrypt in 2015. Let’s Encrypt was designed to be a free, open, and transparent Certificate Authority. Announced in 2014, the CA issued its first certificate on September 14th, 2015, and started providing public service on December 3rd of the same year.

2020

1 Billionth Let’s Encrypt Certificate Issued

In late February 2020, Let’s Encrypt issued its billionth TLS certificate. This monumental number represented the new age of Internet security that ISRG and Let’s Encrypt helped usher in. By November 2020, 84% of page loads used HTTPS globally.

2020

Prossimo Launched

Around the same time as the issuance of our billionth certificate in 2020, the ISRG team decided it was time to tackle another significant Internet security threat: memory safety. This project, later named Prossimo, took its first steps when collaborating with maintainer Daniel Stenberg to add options to build curl with memory safe HTTP and TLS libraries.

2021

Divvi Up Launched

In 2020, ISRG partnered with Apple, Google, National Institutes of Health, and The MITRE Corporation on the Exposure Notification Private Analytics (ENPA), a service that enables privacy-preserving metrics collection from Covid-19 exposure notification apps. This work helped to kick off the ISRG Prio services project, which was renamed Divvi Up in 2021. Divvi Up joined Prossimo and Let’s Encrypt as ISRG’s third project, focusing on the development of a privacy-respecting metrics collection service.

2022

Let’s Encrypt Receives Levchin Prize

On April 13, 2022, the Real World Crypto steering committee presented the Max Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography to Let’s Encrypt in recognition of the project’s role in developing a more secure Web through the distribution of free and easy to use TLS certificates. ISRG is honored to share this award with past winners like the Tor Project, Ralph Merkle, and Eric Rescorla.

2022

Prossimo Supports Rust Merge into Linux kernel

Support for Rust was merged into the Linux kernel in late 2022. This was the product of years of hard work led by developer Miguel Ojeda, who completed this milestone with support from Prossimo’s Rust for Linux initiative. Though this marked just the beginning for a more memory safe kernel, it was an important first step in building a more secure Web.

What’s in store for the next 10 years

Technology continues to evolve and change at a rapid clip and is becoming ever more enmeshed in our lives and those of our children, friends, colleagues, and loved ones. This trend isn't likely to change any time soon, from healthcare increasingly reliant on Internet connected medical devices, to education using more apps and online learning tools, to the countless other sectors and areas of life all relying more and more on data and technology. For all of these uses, security and privacy can't be forgotten or ignored. As we look toward the next decade of ISRG (and beyond!), we commit to continuing our mission to reduce the financial, technological, and educational barrier to secure communications over the Internet, in whatever form that might take.

“One of the nation's preeminent internet security and privacy organizations, the Internet Security Research Group is increasing web security at scale, making the internet safer for the people and communities most at risk of harmful surveillance. From Let's Encrypt to Divvi Up, for 10 years ISRG has been a standard bearer for reducing inequality in the digital age. ISRG has made enormous contributions to building a privacy-respecting internet, which is crucial for free expression. The Ford Foundation is proud to support their path-breaking efforts.”

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Lori McGlinchey

Director, Ford Foundation's Technology and Society program

“ISRG's impact has been profound and foundational to the future of the Internet. Directly addressing the deeper long term problems of the Internet as a non profit is an incredible act of bravery and selflessness that benefits all of us. ISRG is doing the work to rebuild the underpinnings of the Internet so they are strong and resilient. We can build even bigger, greater things on that foundation”

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Jeff Atwood

Co-founder, Stack Overflow and Discourse

“I'm excited by a group that has long-term thinking on what we can have an impact on in five or 10 years. For better or worse, a lot of software is focused on the next release or the imminent security bugs. But the kind of long-term thinking in which you start the project thinking you will have an impact in 10 years—it is so rare to have that kind of thinking.”

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David Nalley

ISRG Board Member & Principal, Open Source Strategy & Marketing, Amazon

“Good infrastructure [including digital] can create a fairer and more just society. It uplifts everyone by being accessible to all. In short, it ensures equality of opportunity. Of course, we don't know how the future will look. But we do have the power to start building the world we deserve.”

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Siegel Family Endowment

Infrastructure: Building the World We Deserve

Celebrating 10 Years of Building a Better Internet

Looking back at our accomplishments. Looking ahead to many more years of building a brighter Internet.