Yahoo, Google Team Up to Fight Email Snoops

By John P. Mello Jr. 08/13/14 6:20 AM PT

Yahoo and Google last week announced they'd be teaming up to secure their Web mail systems with encryption by the end of next year.

"Our goal is to make end-to-end encryption fully available in 2015," Yahoo Vice President of Information Security Alex Stamos said at the Black Hat hackers' conference in Las Vegas.

"Our team is working closely with Google to ensure that our implementations of end-to-end encryption are compatible," he continued. "What this means is that eventually, not only will Yahoo Mail users be able to communicate in an encrypted manner with other Yahoo Mail users, but also with Gmail users and eventually with other email systems that adopt similar methodologies."

Adopting similar methodologies should be easier for those other email systems because Yahoo will be releasing the code for its encryption solution to the open source community.

"We will release source code this fall so that the open source community can help us refine the experience and hunt for bugs," Stamos said.

Opening the code to many eyes means even the NSA, which has been known to sit on software flaws so it can exploit them in the future for its own self interest, can look at it.

That's a risk worth taking, according to Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP, or pretty good privacy -- the encryption method to be used by Yahoo and Google.

"The benefits of having everyone else look at it far outweigh the problem of having the NSA look at it," he told the E-Commerce Times.

The encryption scheme for Yahoo Mail and Gmail will prevent intermediaries, including Yahoo and other mail providers, from being able to discover or tamper with the content of an email, Stamos explained.

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Yahoo, Google Team Up to Fight Email Snoops