[6] Other partners include the certificate authority IdenTrust,[7] the University of Michigan (U-M),[8] and the Linux Foundation.

[9] The mission for the organization is to create a more secure and privacy-respecting World-Wide Web by promoting the widespread adoption of HTTPS.

[11] This is handled by an automated process designed to overcome manual creation, validation, signing, installation, and renewal of certificates for secure websites.

[12][13] The project claims its goal is to make encrypted connections to World Wide Web servers ubiquitous.

[14] By eliminating payment, web server configuration, validation email management and certificate renewal tasks, it is meant to significantly lower the complexity of setting up and maintaining TLS encryption.

[15] On a Linux web server, execution of only two commands is sufficient to set up HTTPS encryption and acquire and install certificates.

[18][19] Current initiatives of major browser developers such as Mozilla and Google to deprecate unencrypted HTTP are counting on the availability of Let's Encrypt.

[24] The domain validation (DV) utilized by Let's Encrypt dates back to 2002 and was at first controversial when introduced by GeoTrust before becoming a widely accepted method for the issuance of SSL certificates.

[16] The Let's Encrypt project was started in 2012 by two Mozilla employees, Josh Aas and Eric Rescorla, together with Peter Eckersley at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and J. Alex Halderman at the University of Michigan.

[29] On June 16, 2015, the final launch schedule for the service was announced, with the first certificate expected to be issued sometime in the week of July 27, 2015, followed by a limited issuance period to test security and scalability.

On the same day, ISRG submitted its root program applications to Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Apple.

[7] On November 12, 2015, Let's Encrypt announced that general availability would be pushed back and that the first public beta would commence on December 3, 2015.

[38] Through working with software vendors and contacting site operators, Let's Encrypt was able to get 1.7 million of the affected certificates renewed before the deadline.

[50] The certificate authority consists of a piece of software called Boulder, written in Go, that implements the server side of the ACME protocol.

It is published as free software with source code under the terms of version 2 of the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

An Apache-licensed[52] Python certificate management program called certbot (formerly letsencrypt) gets installed on the client side (the Web server of an enrollee).