Security News > 2022 > September > Peter Eckersley, co-creator of Let’s Encrypt, dies at just 43
I'm devastated to report that Peter Eckersley [], one of the original founders of Let's Encrypt, died earlier this evening [2022-09-02] at CPMC Davies Hospital in San Francisco.
Peter was the leader of EFF's contributions to Let's Encrypt and ACME over the course of several years during which these technologies turned from a wild idea into an important part of Internet infrastructure.
You can find a very abbreviated version of this history in the Let's Encrypt paper, to which Peter and I both contributed.
Let's Encrypt wasn't the first effort to try to build a free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer infrastructure for online encryption certificates, but the Let's Encrypt team was the first to build a free certificate signing system that was simple, scalable and solid.
As a result, the Let's Encrypt project was soon able to to gain the trust of the browser making community, to the point of quickly getting accepted as a approved certificate signer by most mainstream browsers.
Thanks to the perseverance, personality and persuasiveness of Peter Eckersley and his co-creators we don't hear those complaints much on Naked Security any more.