(We created the Comcast Innovation Fund to support important research into the future of the Internet, with a focus on broadband, security and open-source development. In this series, we highlight grantees and their work.)

The Comcast Innovation Fund is pleased to announce the award of a grant to support Let’s Encrypt. This grant will support the continuation of their mission and general scaling up to handle growth. The program is run by the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).

As their website says, Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. Let’s Encrypt offers a free, user friendly way for Internet users to get the digital certificates they need in order to enable HTTPS (SSL/TLS) for websites. Let’s Encrypt secures communications for nearly 50 million websites worldwide.  

We’ve been impressed by the work the Internet Security Research Group has done on Let’s Encrypt and are honored to support the project.