Open Source SSL – Something to Look Out For

We all know what SSL stands for in terms of the internet and safety alike, right?!

No?

Well, please allow our more ‘techy’ voice to come forward. The acronym SSL is for Secure Sockets Layer, and it is represented by the little green padlock that you can see in the left hand side of your URL bar. When you see that green lock, you can have faith that the connection to the site you have visited is safe.

SSL essentially is responsible for encrypting the data between the website and the visitor, and in doing so, ensures that no person or bot in the middle can read it. The SSL protocol was invented in 1994, revised in 1999 into SSL 3.0 or TLS (Transport Layer Security), and hasn’t been given much attention since. This is because SSL had been doing such a fantastic job of keeping the internet secure for so many years.

For those who were willing to pay for it anyways.

It’s not that buying a yearly subscription to encrypt your site is necessarily expensive for a business (around $80 per year), but rather the process of doing so is extremely tedious, and annoying to update.

Luckily for us, there’s Let’s Encrypt. The very first and only of its kind, Let’s Encrypt is currently in the beta process of trying to deliver free and easy-to-use SSL/TLS to everyone everywhere. Let’s Encrypt is backed by massive companies like Mozilla, Cisco, Shopify (Canada’s own), OVH, and even Facebook and Google. In 2014, Google even went so far as to give sites with SSL protection a higher SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking benefit to help encourage website owners to enable SSL. Hopefully it will be fully available for everyone to use in late 2016. Be sure to keep an eye out on this with their blog.