Peter Eckersley, Co-Creator of Let's Encrypt, Dies at 43

Seven years ago, Slashdot reader #66,542 announced 'Panopticlick 2.0,' a site showing how your web browser handles trackers.

But it was just one of the many privacy-protecting projects Peter Eckersley worked on, as a staff technologist at the EFF for more than a decade. Eckersley also co-created Let's Encrypt, which today is used by hundreds of millions of people.

Friday the EFF's director of cybersecurity announced the sudden death of Eckersley at age 43. 'If you have ever used Let's Encrypt or Certbot or you enjoy the fact that transport layer encryption on the web is so ubiquitous it's nearly invisible, you have him to thank for it,' the announcement says. 'Raise a glass.'

Peter Eckersley's web site is still online, touting 'impactful privacy and cybersecurity projects' that he co-created, including not just Let's Encrypt, Certbot, and Panopticlick, but also Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere. And in addition, 'During the COVID-19 pandemic he convened the the stop-covid.tech group, advising many groups working on privacy-preserving digital contact tracing and exposure notification, assisting with several strategy plans for COVID mitigation.' You can also still find Peter Eckersley's GitHub repositories online.

But Peter 'had apparently revealed recently that he had been diagnosed with cancer,' according to a tribute posted online by security company Sophos, noting his impact is all around us:
If you click on the padlock in your browser [2022-09-0T22:37:00Z], you'll see that this site, like our sister blog site Sophos News, uses a web certificate that's vouched for by Let's Encrypt, now a well-established Certificate Authority (CA). Let's Encrypt, as a CA, signs TLS cryptographic certificates for free on behalf of bloggers, website owners, mail providers, cloud servers, messaging services...anyone, in fact, who needs or wants a vouched-for encryption certificate, subject to some easy-to-follow terms and conditions....

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 (a trusted-by-default root CA, in the jargon) by most mainstream browsers....

In recent years, Peter founded the AI Objectives Institute, with the aim of ensuring that we pick the right social and economic problems to solve with AI:

'We often pay more attention to how those goals are to be achieved than to what those goals should be in the first place. At the AI Objectives Institute, our goal is better goals.'

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