Microsoft Boosts Outlook.com, OneDrive Encryption

Microsoft has boosted encryption for Outlook.com and OneDrive.

Several months after pledging to beef up encryption across its services, Microsoft today announced some new security protections for Outlook.com and OneDrive.

Redmond has rolled out Transport Layer Security (TLS) on Outlook.com for inbound and outbound email. "This means that when you send an email to someone, your email is encrypted and thus better protected as it travels between Microsoft and other email providers," Microsoft said, provided the recipient's email service also has TLS support.

Microsoft said it coordinated with several international providers - like Deutsche Telekom, Yandex, and Mail.Ru - over the last six months to make sure its solution worked.

The company is also rolling out Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) for Outlook.com and OneDrive. "Forward secrecy uses a different encryption key for every connection, making it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections," said Matt Thomlinson, vice president of Trustworthy Computing Security at Microsoft.

PFS, which Twitter rolled out last year, will be on by default for those who access OneDrive via onedrive.live.com, the OneDrive app, and Microsoft's sync clients.

Other security upgrades made over the past few months, meanwhile, include enhanced message encryption in Office 365 and ExpressRoute for Azure, which enables businesses to create private connections between Azure data centers and infrastructure on their premises or in a co-location environment.

Microsoft's push for enhanced security came in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, and accusations that the National Security Agency (NSA) was spying on data traveling between the data centers of top companies like Google and Yahoo, which has also rolled out more robust encryption.

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Microsoft Boosts Outlook.com, OneDrive Encryption