The Major Tech Players Are Enforcing Improved Encryption Rules

Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Comcast and Google have teamed up to develop a new e-mail procedure that ensures the information you deliver is secured. In the offer that they have sent to the US authorities, these technical leaders called their development SMTP STS.

In fact, the actual technology behind e-mail systems has stayed mostly the same since it became initially available many years ago. A security protocol was presented in previous tears and major e-mail suppliers such as Gmail do utilize it, but it is vulnerable to modern strikes that have been recently developed.

For example, a skilled hacker could place a replica of digital certification and the program would identify it as genuine. This means that people may end up delivering emails to unprotected web servers without them even knowing about this problem.

Further, it might continue delivering these messages even if the program sees that the servers are not protected. The SMTP protocol, which is utilized to transfer information between e-mail customers and web servers but also from one company to another, is more than three decades old and was not developed with any security feature.

For that reason, in 2000, an extra option named STARTTLS was included to the system as a method to add transport layers) with SMTP links. Unfortunately, during the following several years, the add-on was not commonly implemented, so e-mail traffic interchanged between web servers stayed mostly unprotected.

That problem was modified a couple of years ago, when numerous secret documents were released with key records, which exposed extensive monitoring of Internet emails by governments and other authorities from the United States, United Kingdom and other nations in the European Union.

The new program can avoid either situation from occurring. It assesses if a domain where the users are delivering messages facilitates the SMTP protocol and ensures that its security certification is genuine and actualized.

If every evaluation is in accordance with the security measures, it allows e-mails to get through the barrier. However, if it finds something dubious, it will get rid of the delivered message and will inform the users about it.

It is right to affirm that the organizations engaged will integrate the technological innovation into their solutions if this protocol is accepted, since it is their engineers’ development, after all. Therefore, the secured information delivered and obtained by Google’s mail service could increase from 70 to 85%, respectively, to double.

Image source: Extremetech