Microsoft today announced it is adding new encryption support for its OneDrive cloud storage service and its Outlook.com email website, along with the opening of its first Transparency Center.
Outlook.com is now further protected by Transport Layer Security, or TLS, encryption for both outbound and inbound 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. Of course, this requires their email service provider to also have TLS support.
Over the past six months, Microsoft have been working to further protect and help ensure mail remains protected. This includes working closely with several international providers throughout the implementation, including, Deutsche Telekom, Yandex and Mail.Ru to test and help ensure that mail stays encrypted in transit to and from each email service.
In addition to the availability of TLS, Outlook.com has also enabled Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) encryption support for sending and receiving mail between email providers. Forward secrecy uses a different encryption key for every connection, making it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections.
OneDrive has now enabled PFS encryption support as well. OneDrive customers now automatically get forward secrecy when accessing OneDrive through onedrive.live.com, via mobile OneDrive application and sync clients. As with Outlook.com’s email transfer, this makes it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections between their systems and OneDrive.
Finally, Microsoft announced that today they opened the first Microsoft Transparency Center, on their Redmond, Wash. campus.
The Transparency Centers provide participating governments with the ability to review source code for key products, assure themselves of their software integrity, and confirm there are no “back doors.†The Redmond location is the first in a number of regional transparency centers that Microsoft plan to open.
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