TLS-supporting websites in .RU reach 236,000

The 71st meeting of the Asian-Pacific Top Level Domain Association is taking place on March 2-3 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The event has brought together representatives of national registries and technical centers from 27 countries in the Asian and Pacific region and Europe. Dmitry Belyvasky, a leading developer from Russia’s Technical Center of Internet (TCI), spoke about the use of TLS in the Russian national domain .RU.

Pavel Khramtsov from the TCI application service department will make presentations at three sessions. Today he talked about DDoS response in .RU, and tomorrow, he will be speaking about the Netoscope project and server productivity measurements.

Cybersecurity is traditionally one of the most widely discussed subjects at ATPLD meetings, and the current event is no exception. A session was devoted entirely to TLS, where participants discussed the latest trends in the development and spread of TLS certificates, and shared experiences in the implementation of effective security policy at this internet level.

Dmitry Belyavsky said the Russian TLS certificate market is growing fast with the number of TLS-supporting websites having reached 236,000 in January, against 34,000 in July 2015, or just 18 months ago, and a little over 100,000 in July 2016. TLS ensures that websites communicate through the encrypted HTTPS protocol, and the growing number of Russian HTTPS-using websites means that the Russian web segment is becoming more secure.

The Let’s Encrypt project, which issues free certificates for three months, has greatly increased the number of valid certificates and is responsible for 43 percent of Russia’s certificates.

“Although TLS penetration is only 4 percent, this is the fastest spreading technology in 2015-2016. We can say the number of TLS-supporting domains is steadily growing, as evidenced by the fact that 90 percent of those using HTTPS will still be using it next month,” Dmitry Belyavsky said.