Background

This page contains resources for a talk I delivered at the 2026 CEN Member Conference. We have been using Let’s Encrypt for a while, and several CEN members were interested in learning more so we provided this talk.

While 50 minutes isn’t enough time to go into major detail, I tried to cover the basics of operation and provide some examples. My hope is that people who watched the talk can say “Hey, I think I could do that too!”

Here’s the abstract for the talk:

Many services, particularly web servers, require encryption certificates to securely communicate with their clients. Certificates must be obtained from a central authority and renewed regularly; the expiration time of certificates continues to shrink in the name of better security. Let’s Encrypt is a central authority that issues certificates to organizations free of charge. They have a strong focus on automation, helping reduce the burden when renewing certificates with short lifetimes.

This session aims to introduce Let’s Encrypt by explaining how the service works and providing examples of its use. Participants will have examples of how to integrate Let’s Encrypt into their own workflows for certificate management.

If you have any questions, or if you found the talk helpful, please let me know!

Downloads

• PDF version of the slide deck
• Audio from the talk, with accompanying slides h265 | h264