Peter Eckersley
lorenetworking
The EFF technologist who co-founded Let's Encrypt, and so removed the price of encrypting a website.
Two of this catalogue's threads meet in one person. The certificate article argues that encryption stayed off most of the web because it was a budget line and a chore, and that removing both changed the security posture of the internet more than any protocol did - he is who removed them, beginning with a conversation at a conference in 2012 about automating the thing everyone did by hand. And the site's own fingerprint demonstration belongs to a genre he invented at the EFF, where showing a person exactly what a tracker could read about them turned out to argue the case better than any explanation. He died in 2022, at 43. An obituary put the first achievement plainly: deprecating a billion-dollar industry overnight, and leaving better security behind for everyone.
Also known as: eckersley, panopticlick, https everywhere, certbot
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame: a key contributor to Let's Encrypt, HTTPS Everywhere, the SSL Observatory and Certbot; Let's Encrypt is now the largest public certificate authority in the world and significantly responsible for improving TLS and HTTPS adoption across the internet
- Let's Encrypt: Eckersley met Alex Halderman at the RSA Conference in 2012 and the two began planning technology to automate the acquisition of HTTPS certificates, work that included early designs for what became the ACME protocol; he died on 2 September 2022
- Peter Daniel Eckersley, Australian computer scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2006 to 2018 as chief computer scientist, who in 2012 co-founded Let's Encrypt alongside developers from Mozilla and the University of Michigan