Peter Eckersley, co-founder of Let’s Encrypt, a non-profit certification body of the Internet Security Research Group that offers free X.509 certificates for transport layer security encryption, has died at the age of 43 after it was recently revealed that he had cancer.
Peter co-founded the Let’s Encrypt team, which was the first to develop a free certificate signature system that was simple, scalable, and robust. It also earned the trust of the browser creation community and was quickly accepted as a recognized certificate signer (a trusted-by-default root CA, in the jargon) by the majority of most popular browsers.
His contribution to HTTPS through Let’s Encrypt made it an extremely popular tool for website owners, as he eliminated the difficulty of understanding the terms.
He was also able to use it to embark on other achievments including creating the appropriate keypairs and certificates, submitting the required certificate signing requests, paying the service charge to have them processed, and deploying them annually.
Peter also founded the AI Objectives Institute to make sure people can solve the right social and economic problems with AI. In his opinion, we often focus on how to achieve goals, not what those goals should be. Our goal at the AI Objectives Institute is to create better goals.
Peter’s contributions are undoubtedly enormous, and he will be greatly missed.
The sources for this piece include an article in NakedSecurity.