Going Back to Our Roots: A Little Piece of Let's Encrypt History

Ten years ago, we printed one of the nerdiest t-shirts we’ve ever made. On the front was the entire PEM encoding of ISRG Root X1 in base64. Back then, it represented a future we were working toward. Today, that same design tells the story of just how far Let’s Encrypt has come.

Let’s Encrypt was already issuing publicly trusted certificates in 2016, but ISRG Root X1 itself was still slowly and quietly making its way into browsers and operating systems around the world. For many years, our certificates were trusted through a cross-sign from IdenTrust. ISRG Root X1 itself was added to the major trust stores fairly early on; the slow part was waiting for that update to reach the browsers and devices already out in the world, since many of them only get new trust stores when they’re updated. That took years.

I remember the day we generated Root X1 and the planning and careful execution involved. We all breathed a sigh of relief when it was done but knew that we were really just crossing the starting line since our goal was, and continues to be, to get the Web to 100% encryption.

— Josh Aas, Co-Founder and Executive Director, ISRG

The Internet’s Quiet Infrastructure

When you visit a website over HTTPS, your browser follows a chain of trust that ultimately leads back to a trusted root certificate, like Root X1. If everything is working correctly, the entire process is invisible. You see a secure connection and the cryptography quietly does its job.

When we started, 39% of page loads were encrypted. Today, in much of the world, it’s over 80%. Hundreds of millions of websites rely on Let’s Encrypt certificates every day. Most of the people using those websites will never know the name “ISRG Root X1,” and that’s exactly the point. What once required optimism and patience has become something billions of people depend on without even knowing it’s there.

The Same Design, A Different Meaning

That’s what made us want to bring it back. In 2016, it represented a goal. Looking back ten years later, we realized the same design had come to represent something entirely different.

Today, it represents a decade of work and support by engineers, contributors, sponsors, donors, and advocates who believed that secure communication on the web should be free, automated, and available to everyone. Their support helped make HTTPS the default, not a privilege.

If you have one of the few original shirts, let us know how it’s treating you by dropping a line to donate@abetterinternet.org.

A Story Worth Wearing

Let’s Encrypt is run by Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), a nonprofit funded by the generosity of our community. Every certificate we issue and every new challenge we take on is made possible by people who believe the Internet should be more secure and privacy-respecting for everyone.

If you donate $75 or more this summer we’ll send you a limited-edition ISRG Root X1 t-shirt and you can help share our story.

Then you’ll have the chance to tell the story of how you support one small piece of Internet infrastructure that went from an ambitious idea to something a large part of the web quietly depends on every day.