Let's Encrypt! How the ACME protocol works and provides free HTTPS to the world

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BIO:
Our speaker this month is Daniel Roesler. Daniel is the maintainer of acme-tiny, a widely used ACME certificate issuance library, and gethttpsforfree.com, a zero-knowledge website that allows webmasters manually obtain free TLS certificates without having to install any programs on their servers. He also maintains other open source privacy and cryptography related projects, volunteers for the League of Women Voters, and is the founder and CTO of UtilityAPI, a clean energy software company.

TALK SUMMARY:
As of April 2022, the nonprofit Certificate Authority "Let's Encrypt" issues TLS certificates for 280 million websites (2-3 million certs per day, ~25% of all websites).

All for free. As a non-profit.

How did they pull this off? What has the impact been? How does this even work? In this presentation, you will learn about the impact of the mass adoption of encrypting websites and how the ACME protocol works for issuing free certificates.