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Security: Better Email Encryption to be available by Large Email Providers
US tech giants are under pressure to incorporate more secure features into their products. Email, in particular, is one technology that is closely scrutinized, particularly after revelations of snoopings by the NSA.
Google, Microsoft and most recently Yahoo have announced plans to provide options for sending encrypted emails. Smaller email providers like ProtonMail and LavaBit (used by Snowden) have are already offering encryption. The tools being developed by Google and now Yahoo rely on technology called PGP. Microsoft has adopted something called Transport Layer Security (TLS), although the PGP option offers more security. As for PGP, until now it has demonstrated a high level of security, but it has also been clumsy and time-consuming to use. PGP requires that users, rather than tech companies, store encryption keys on their laptop and smartphone devices. Those extra steps needed by users though have made it too hard to use for most people
Christopher Soghoian, a security and privacy researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union, commented that “how do you get children to eat their spinach? PGP is even less tasty than spinach.”
Jeremy Gillula, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that “for Internet users, this is a huge dea… Before, the NSA was able to easily gather up tons and tons of email. [But with encryption], the NSA can’t read and analyze everyone’s emails without discernment.”
One worry is that the NSA (and possibly others) are already able to crack PGP encryption, although PGP has never known to be hacked. But even if they can, cracking PGP messages would likely require massive amounts of computing power, so that it wouldn’t be feasible, at least now, to decrypt large numbers of emails, and if it is done, it would need to be done more selectively.
Bruce Schneier, a well-known cryptographer, however warns that “these big companies [Google, Microsoft, Yahoo] don’t want to encrypt your stuff because they spy on you, too… Hopefully, the NSA debate is creating incentives for people to build more encryption.”
