Our mission is to protect Internet users by lowering monetary, technological, and informational barriers to a more secure and privacy-respecting Internet.
ISRG was founded in May of 2013 to serve as a home for public-benefit digital infrastructure projects, the first of which was the Let's Encrypt certificate authority. ISRG's founding directors were Josh Aas and Eric Rescorla. The group's founding sponsors and partners were Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the University of Michigan, Cisco, and Akamai.
In 2021, ISRG launched two new digital security projects: Prossimo, a memory safety project, and Divvi Up, a privacy-preserving metrics system.
ISRG is a California public benefit corporation, and is recognized by the IRS as a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Our EIN is 46-3344200.
ISRG is proudly sponsored by a diverse group of organizations, from small businesses and other non-profits to Fortune 100 companies. We aim to set an example for how everyone interested in a more secure Internet can work together to provide digital infrastructure for the public’s benefit. See this page for more on our sponsors.
To learn more about ISRG and the history of Let's Encrypt, please check out Let's Encrypt, An Automated Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web, which was published for the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in 2019.