What is Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate?

1. About Lets Encrypt SSL Certificate

It’s a free SSL certificate issued
by Lets Encrypt. Lets Encrypt is a not for profit certification authority (CA)
run by  Internet Security Research Group,
a company founded in 2014 with offices in San Francisco.

As of 2019, they had only 13 staff
and had a budget of $3.6 Million.

Internet Security Research Group is
a public benefit organization supported by the Internet Community.

As at 2019 it’s mandatory to have an
SSL certificate on any web project or app online. SSL prices had become a
barrier in the drive to encrypt the entire internet and therefore top internet
companies supported this initiative to ensure all the internet is encrypted.

Top partners to Internet Security Research Group include:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),
• Mozilla Foundation, 

• OVH, 
• CiscoSystems, 
• Facebook, 
• Google Chrome,

• Internet Society,
• University of Michigan (U-M)
• Stanford Law School,
• Linux Foundation
• And Others

Including Hosting companies such as SiteGround, Digital Ocean, Truehost
Cloud among others.

But who is Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),  – the top
partner ? Read More About EFF

The following sits on the board of Internet Security Research Group as
at April 2019

• Josh Aas (ISRG) — ISRG Executive Director
• Stephen Ludin (Akamai)
• J. Alex Halderman (University of
  Michigan)
• Jennifer Granick (ACLU)
• Laura Thomson (Mozilla)
• Richard Barnes (Cisco)
• Peter Eckersley (Electronic
  Frontier Foundation)
• Alex Polvi (CoreOS)
• Pascal Jaillon (OVH)

Let’s Encrypt has been issuing SSL certificates crossed signed by Iden
Trust but as at 2019, Lets Encrypt will start to sign their own SSL Certificate
using their own Root CA.

Let’s Encrypt has issued Millions of SSL Certificates since inception.

As at 4 August 2019 Lets Encrypt had more than 110M active SSL
certificates.

Read more here: https://letsencrypt.org/stats/

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)