Soon Wildcard certificates from Let’s Encrypt

Let’s Encrypt, which appeared on April 12, 2016 does not stop surprising. In 2017, the number of secured pages was increased from 46% to 67% (data from the Mozilla Foundation) for unique domains. In July of that year, the introduction of SSL wildcard certificates was announced. This feature was long awaited by all users. Yesterday, i.e. January 4, 2018, access to the ACME v2 protocol test API was made available. It allows to generate wildcard certificates. On 27 February 2018 the official launch and support for SSL wildcard is planned.

Let’s Encrypt Certificates are available free of charge and are provided with not all of our hosting accounts. From the statistics provided by the project you can read that more than 49 million certificates are active. Let’s Encrypt is planning to double this number in 2018 to around 90 million. A year later almost 120 million domains are to be secured.

These SSL Wildcard certificates will also be available for free. All our users will be able to secure their domains and subdomains.

The introduction of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) is also planned at a later stage. Let’s Encrypt keys will be signed with a new algorithm to increase their security. It is widely believed that ECDSA is the future of digital algorithm signatures on the Internet. This is because of their much higher performance compared to the RSA.

Let’s Encrypt’s CA infrastructure is capable of issuing one million certificates per day. This has been achieved thanks to the appropriate number of servers, the stability of the entire infrastructure and a wide range of security measures. The entire infrastructure can generate and sign almost 20 million OCSP responses per day. The service also responds to 2 billion of such requests per day. In 2018, the number of signatures, queries and responses of TSOs is expected to double.