No domain left behind: is Let's Encrypt democratizing encryption?

Abstract

The 2013 National Security Agency revelations of pervasive monitoring have lead to an "encryption rush" across the computer and Internet industry. To push back against massive surveillance and protect users privacy, vendors, hosting and cloud providers have widely deployed encryption on their hardware, communication links, and applications. As a consequence, the most of web traffic nowadays is encrypted. However, there is still a significant part of Internet traffic that is not encrypted. It has been argued that both costs and complexity associated with obtaining and deploying X.509 certificates are major barriers for widespread encryption, since these certificates are required to established encrypted connections. To address these issues, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and the University of Michigan have set up Let's Encrypt (LE), a certificate authority that provides both free X.509 certificates and software that automates the deployment of these certificates. In this paper, we investigate if LE has been successful in democratizing encryption: we analyze certificate issuance in the first year of LE and show from various perspectives that LE adoption has an upward trend and it is in fact being successful in covering the lower-cost end of the hosting market.