“The CA software itself is written in memory safe Golang, but from our server operating systems to our network equipment, lack of memory safety routinely leads to vulnerabilities that need patching.”
Let’s Encrypt started Prossimo in 2020, and four years later the first piece of its work runs in production: a time daemon. Work on ntpd-rs began in April 2022 and reached staging in April 2024. Next on the list are OpenSSL, the DNS software, Nginx and sudo. At this pace the C code in a certificate authority outlives most of the certificates.