A nonprofit effort aimed at encrypting the entire Web has reached an important milestone: its HTTPS certificates are now trusted by all major browsers.
The service, which is backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Cisco Systems, and Akamai, is known as Let's Encrypt. As Ars reported last year, the group will offer free HTTPS certificates to anyone who owns a domain name. Let's Encrypt promises to provide open source tools that automate processes for both applying for and receiving the credential and configuring a website to use it securely.
HTTPS uses the transport layer security or secure sockets layer protocols to secure websites in two important ways. First, it encrypts communications passing between visitors and the Web server so they can't be read or modified by anyone who may be monitoring the connection. Second, it cryptographically proves that a server belongs to the organization claiming ownership rather than an imposter posing as that organization.