Let's Encrypt will be trusted by Firefox 50

The Let's Encrypt project, which provides a free SSL/TLS certificate authority (CA), has announced that Mozilla has accepted the project's root key into the Mozilla root program and will be trusted by default as of Firefox 50. This is a step forward from Let's Encrypt's earlier status. "In order to start issuing widely trusted certificates as soon as possible, we partnered with another CA, IdenTrust, which has a number of existing trusted roots. As part of that partnership, an IdenTrust root 'vouches for' the certificates that we issue, thus making our certificates trusted. We're incredibly grateful to IdenTrust for helping us to start carrying out our mission as soon as possible. However, our plan has always been to operate as an independently trusted CA. Having our root trusted directly by the Mozilla root program represents significant progress towards that independence." The project has also applied for inclusion the CA trust roots maintained by Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Blackberry. News on those programs is still pending.