Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering free digital certificates to help companies automate use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) cryptographic protocols.
The announcement has been met with skepticism from some industry pros, in light of a similar move by the open certificate authority Let’s Encrypt.
Let’s Encrypt began offering open source certificates in September, and then rolled its free SSL certificates out of beta earlier this month. The digital certificates were then used by malware developers to avoid detection in distributing a new malware family that surveils infected devices’ activity and send information to attackers.
AWS’ certificate manager “is designed to simplify and automate many of the tasks traditionally associated with provisioning and managing SSL/TLS certificates,” wrote Amazon’s Craig Liebendorfer in a blog post.