RIP, Peter Eckersley (UPDATEDx5)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 04, 2022,
updated Sep 09, 2022

• Peter Eckersley, may his memory be a blessing - Praise - Let's Encrypt Community Support

  I'm devastated to report that Peter Eckersley (@pde), one of the original founders of Let's Encrypt, died earlier this evening at CPMC Davies Hospital in San Francisco.

  Peter was the leader of EFF's contributions to Let's Encrypt and ACME over the course of several years during which these technologies turned from a wild idea into an important part of Internet infrastructure. He also took a lot of initiative in coalescing the EFF, Mozilla, and University of Michigan teams into a single team and a single project. He later served on the initial board of directors of the Internet Security Research Group.

  You can find a very abbreviated version of this history in the Let's Encrypt paper, to which Peter and I both contributed.

• Peter Eckersley RIP [LWN.net]

  Peter Eckersley, one of the original founders of the Let's Encrypt non-profit TLS certificate authority, has died suddenly, as reported by Seth Schoen

UPDATE

More from FOSS Force.

• Passings: Peter Eckersley, a Founder of Let’s Encrypt, Dies at 43 - FOSS Force

  FOSS Force has learned that Peter Eckersley, who among other things was a founder of Let’s Encrypt, has died. He was 43 years old. We first learned of his death from a brief notice on LWN.net that links to a post from Seth Schoen, a friend of Eckersley’s who worked with him on Let’s Encrypt, a project that provides short-lived SSL certificates to website owners that Eckersley co-founded in 2012 while working at Electronic Frontiers Foundation.

A word from the EFF on 05/09/22:

• Honoring Peter Eckersley, Who Made the Internet a Safer Place for Everyone

  His most ambitious project was probably Let’s Encrypt, the free and automated certificate authority, which entered public beta in 2015. Peter had been incubating the project for several years, but was able to leverage the famous “smiley face” image from the Edward Snowden leaks showing where SSL was added and removed, to build a coalition that actually made it happen. Let’s Encrypt fostered the web’s transition from non-secure HTTP connections that were vulnerable to eavesdropping, content injection, and cookie stealing, to the more secure HTTPS, so websites could offer secure connections to their users and protect them from network-based threats.

Now another site, paying respect upfront:

• LHB Linux Digest #22.10: Linux Server Security, Know Your System and More

  Unfortunately, I'll have to start this month's newsletter with sad news. The co-creator of Let's Encrypt, Peter Eckersley, lost his battle with cancer at the age of 43. He was also the director of computer science at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has worked on Certbot, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere and many other privacy-related projects. RIP, Peter.

Daniel Pocock's Obituary for Peter Eckersley.

• Obituary: Peter Eckersley

  In 1998, the president of the Melbourne University Student Union, Shelley Marshall, selected two students to represent student interests in the university's strategic decision making bodies.

  Peter Eckersley and I.

  Shelley has no IT experience so she was making this decision based on feedback from the wider community. She was not affiliated with the political groups where Peter and I found support. Somehow she put aside the day-to-day machinations of student politics and appointed these positions on merit alone. History has proven her choices to be correct.

  This created a situation where Peter and I were both rivals and collaborators. Despite the murky nature of student politics and the fact that our association would subsequently become the biggest ever bankruptcy of a non-profit student association, I couldn't find fault with him.

  In September of 1998, when student elections came around, we faced the most unusual situation. Melbourne University Student Union had the privilege of electing seven delegates to the National Union of Students. Out of those seven seats, six candidates won a quota. Three candidates remained: Jacob Varghese, Peter Eckersley and I in a preference battle.

  Jacob was the smoothest political operator of our generation. He took that seat and a few weeks later became president of the NUS too. Today, Jacob is CEO of Australia's most respected plaintiff law firm, Maurice Blackburn. The fact that two students from engineering and computer science, Peter and I, came within striking distance of this hot-shot law student is incredible in itself. Had Peter and I collaborated (think John Nash, game theory), we might have had the last word.

  For a while, Peter was affiliated with the Australian Democrats. They were the third party in Australian politics. Democrat supporters had a reputation for being principled people who refused to associate with the two mainstream political parties. Principles were thrown out the window when the Democrat party imploded. Peter and I both left Australia.

Another tribute.

• Peter Eckersley, co-creator of Let’s Encrypt, dies at just 43

  We don’t often write obituaries on Naked Security, but this is one of the times we’re going to.

  You might not have heard of Peter Eckersley, PhD, but it’s very likely that you’ve relied on a cybersecurity innovation that he not only helped to found, but also to build and establish across the globe.