  The 2013 National Security Agency revelations of pervasive monitoring have
lead to an "encryption rush" across the computer and Internet industry. To push
back against massive surveillance and protect users privacy, vendors, hosting
and cloud providers have widely deployed encryption on their hardware,
communication links, and applications. As a consequence, the most of web
traffic nowadays is encrypted. However, there is still a significant part of
Internet traffic that is not encrypted. It has been argued that both costs and
complexity associated with obtaining and deploying X.509 certificates are major
barriers for widespread encryption, since these certificates are required to
established encrypted connections. To address these issues, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and the University of Michigan have
set up Let's Encrypt (LE), a certificate authority that provides both free
X.509 certificates and software that automates the deployment of these
certificates. In this paper, we investigate if LE has been successful in
democratizing encryption: we analyze certificate issuance in the first year of
LE and show from various perspectives that LE adoption has an upward trend and
it is in fact being successful in covering the lower-cost end of the hosting
market.
