Let’s Encrypt enters public beta – ZDNet France

The initiative Let’s Encrypt continues its merry way. After the announcement of its first certificates, now accepted by the main browsers, the CA gives the kickoff of its public beta phase. Let’s Encrypt! intends to propose a simple and automated alternative to administrators wishing to deploy HTTPS encryption on their sites without the need to go through a traditional certificate authority to obtain a certificate precondition for deployment of an HTTPS encryption.

Let’s Encrypt proposes to automate the entire process through a client, now available in beta. Any administrator of website can then download the client now proposed by Let’s Encrypt to obtain and verify a certificate signed by the authority.

  The authorities nevertheless informed that all the expected features are not present. So those used to automatically renew the certificates supplied are not yet available, as well as automated support for Nginx servers, postfix, exim or Dovecot.

By the same logic, EFF regrets lack of documentation to accompany users. But the project is functional and open, and should appeal to users who want to deploy encryption tools on their site cheaply or without being paid particularly in the matter.

 Let’s Encrypt! is an initiative supported by many actors, including Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai or EFF. The project is also in line with the objectives right the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which campaigns for widespread encryption tools on the web following the Snowden revelations. The organization offers including the extension HTTPS Everywhere. It allows to force the sites to use encryption for their communications with a client.