Nonprofit effort aims to encrypt the Web

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, and other organizations have teamed up to create the infrastructure and tools necessary to help websites offer more secure and private browsing to their visitors.

The group plans to establish a non-profit organization, Let’s Encrypt, that will freely offer digital certificates and open-source tools for configuring and offering the secure Web functionality known as Secure HTTP (HTTPS). While offering free digital certificates is certainly enticing, creating the tools to easily manage the certificate process and set up Web servers to properly handle HTTPS is the most important part of the effort, Peter Eckersley, technology projects director for the EFF, told Ars.

“The unfortunate truth is that there are a lot of obscure and head-spinning technical details that need to be gotten right for a top-notch HTTPS deployment,” he said. “With Let’s Encrypt, we are going to automate as much of that as we possibly can.”

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