Building a certificate authority for the whole Internet

What happened

Twelve years after launching Universal SSL, Cloudflare is applying to become a certificate authority. Encryption stopped being an expensive, time-intensive undertaking and instead became the default.

Two paths to trust A brand-new root is not widely useful for years. That long tail of older clients is where a great deal of the world’s Internet traffic originates, and where a correspondingly large set of avoidable breakage lives.

Acquiring an existing root with a high degree of trust store coverage across a diverse set of clients solves that on day one. A new source of free certificates The free-of-charge, automated certificate model now carries most of the encrypted web, and much of it runs through one remarkable operator.