EFF’s Certbot is now installed on over 4 million web servers, where it’s used to maintain HTTPS certificates for more than 31 million websites. The recent achievement of these milestones helps show the success of the project and the important role it plays in the infrastructure of a secure and encrypted internet.
When EFF helped launch the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority and released the software that’d become Certbot in 2015, the web was a very different place. Less than 40% of websites were loaded using HTTPS, while the rest used unencrypted HTTP. This unencrypted traffic made it easy for malicious actors to eavesdrop, inject content, and take over online accounts by stealing cookies. Today, the percentage of web traffic using HTTPS is over 80% worldwide and over 93% in the United States.
Since Certbot’s first release, it has never stopped growing. The recent achievement of Certbot exceeding 4 million installations actively maintaining certificates with Let’s Encrypt is just our latest metric showcasing this growth. Additionally, since many servers host more than one website, these installations are responsible for more than 22 million certificates covering more than 31 million domain names. That’s more than 31 million websites that Certbot is helping to offer HTTPS. These benefits extend to every person who visits those sites.
But even these numbers are probably low, because they reflect only Certbot use with Let’s Encrypt. The ACME protocol is an open standard which allows others to create their own projects that are compatible with these tools. Since Certbot and Let’s Encrypt launched, lots of other software has been created —including other ACME certificate authorities —and the number of these is likely to increase.
Earlier this year, Google made changes to the Chrome root program that require all new certificate authorities to offer automated certificate issuance, and specifically encouraged certificate authorities to support ACME. These changes are good for the security of the internet and are likely to further encourage the adoption of ACME software like Certbot.
If you’d like to support us in our work in continuing to develop and support Certbot, especially for the millions of people who find it useful and have come to rely on it, please consider donating to EFF.
