DoNews news on April 16 (Liu Wenxuan) was established by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) in 2015. The digital certificate authentication agency let’s encrypt, which was recognized by real world crypto and Max Levchin, was awarded the Levchin award in the field of cryptography.

Let’s encrypt is currently used by more than 280 million websites and issues 2 to 3 million vouchers every day. Let’s encrypt is an important driver for the massive adoption of HTTPS.

ISRG CEO Josh AAS mentioned that in order to give billions of Internet users better privacy and security, it is necessary to persuade hundreds of millions of websites to switch to HTTPS and complete the changes in three to five years. Let’s encrypt has started this difficult work since most of them are volunteers and a very small number of employees. Until now, let’s encrypt has 11 engineers and a small team responsible for fund-raising, communication and management tasks.

Let’s encrypt won the Levchin award because the steering committee of the real world crypto conference believes that ease of use is the key to the application of encryption technology. Josh AAS said that although the technology used by let’s encrypt is quite complex, they try to reduce the complexity exposed to users as much as possible. Ideally, let’s encrypt is a fully automated and easily forgotten background service even for those who manage the server.

The free service of let’s encrypt is the focus of high ease of use. Josh AAS said that the free service has nothing to do with the price that users are willing to pay, because any financial transaction itself will make the service unable to be fully automated, and users may need to go through the company’s approval process.