Microsoft Reveals Tougher Email Encryption After Google Remarks

July 1, 2014

Peter Suciu for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Last month Google Inc. called out rival email providers for not providing enough encryption for their respective users email accounts. Some of those rivals apparently took notice and quickly addressed the issue. On Tuesday Cnet reported that Microsoft unveiled tougher encryption standards for its web-based email and some cloud services.

Googles latest transparency report suggested that less than 50 percent of emails received by Google users through its Gmail service from Microsofts Hotmail, Live and MSN were in fact encrypted. Now Microsoft is implementing a series of changes that will provide better protection from potential prying eyes. Microsofts email services Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, Live.com and MSN.com are now secured via Transport Layer Security (TLS) protections, and this is meant to ensure that communications through these web-based programs are safe and secure.

We are in the midst of a comprehensive engineering effort to strengthen encryption across our networks and services, Matt Thomlinson, vice president for trustworthy computing security at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. Our goal is to provide even greater protection for data across all the great Microsoft services you use and depend on every day. This effort also helps us reinforce that governments use appropriate legal processes, not technical brute force, if they want access to that data.

Thomlinson noted that the TLS encryption will be provided to both inbound and outbound email; and it will be encrypted and better protected as the email travels between Microsoft and other email providers.

There is a catch, however.

Of course, this requires their email service provider to also have TLS support, Thomlinson added.

Cnets Seth Rosenblatt reported that Comcast and Microsoft are already in the process of implementing TLS for their webmail services.

Outlook.com users will further get an extra level of security, as Microsoft announced that it has also enabled Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) encryption support for both sending and receiving of email between providers. This also utilizes a different encryption key for every connection, which the software giant claimed would make it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections.

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Microsoft Reveals Tougher Email Encryption After Google Remarks