Making the web more secure with Let's Encrypt

Trusted certificates are fundamental block to make the web secure. Traditionally, Certificate Authorities have taken advantage of their privileged position in the market by charging people that want to keep their website secure and creating convoluted verification and signing processes. Let’s Encrypt disrupted this market by offering an open and transparent process to obtain free certificates. They also adopted modern practices to create an integration platform for other companies to use. In this talk, we’ll cover how Let’s Encrypt works and why it’s so important.

At Netlify, we’re building a platform to help people automate web projects. Part of our goals is to make securing websites the most straight forward process possible. That’s why we’ve integrated Let’s Encrypt into the platform. This talk covers how the Let’s Encrypt certificate issuing process works and how companies can use it.

Integrating trusted certificates into a web platform requires having knowledge of how fundamental Internet concepts work. We’ll talk about how DNS propagation affects how certificate issuing and how we propagate certificates across our CDN points of presence around the world.

Finally, we’ll talk about the lessons we’ve learned building this platform and what we’re doing to improve upon our work. Let’s Encrypt has opened a new world of possibilities to make the web more secure.