• Author and Date: By Josh Aas on December 11, 2024.
• Image: Josh Aas Headshot.
• Origin: This letter was originally published in the 2024 Annual Report.
• ISRG's Past Year: It was a great year with proud staff, community, funders, and partners. Let's Encrypt thrived, serving more websites with excellent security and stability. Understanding of making privacy-preserving metrics mainstream through Divvi Up is evolving.
• Prossimo's Work: Made important investments in making software critical infrastructure safer in areas like TLS, DNS, and the Linux kernel.
• Let's Encrypt's 10th Anniversary: Next year is the 10th anniversary. Internally, things have changed, but the service hasn't much. The vision of free 90-day TLS certificates via automated API remains powerful. Currently, over 500 million websites benefit and most of the web is encrypted.
• New Offering: Introducing short-lived certificates with a lifetime of six days, a big upgrade for TLS ecosystem security by minimizing key compromise exposure time. Most subscribers won't need to do much to switch. But they need to prepare for potentially issuing 20 times more certificates, and even 100 million per day in the next decade.
• Past Achievements: Building Let's Encrypt was hard and scaling it to serve half a billion websites was difficult. Getting Divvi Up service up and running in three months was not easy. Prossimo project contributed to creating a TLS library with memory safety and outperforming peers.
• Importance of Contributions: Charitable contributions from people and organizations make all this possible. Tens of thousands have donated since 2015, with various donation methods adding up to millions used to change the Internet. It is hoped that more will join to lay the foundation for another great decade.
• Josh Aas's Position: Executive Director.