{"id":122516,"date":"2014-06-03T23:38:51","date_gmt":"2014-06-03T23:38:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=122516"},"modified":"2014-06-04T13:28:08","modified_gmt":"2014-06-04T13:28:08","slug":"new-gmail-data-shows-rise-backbone-email-encryption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/new-gmail-data-shows-rise-backbone-email-encryption\/","title":{"rendered":"New Gmail data shows the rise of backbone email encryption"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past few years, EFF has been working on\u00a0promoting the universal use of encryption<\/a>\u00a0for Internet protocols. We started by pushing major sites to switch from HTTP to HTTPS, and gave individual users ways to\u00a0pull things along<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last November, we launched our\u00a0Encrypt the Web Scorecard<\/a>, which in addition to Web encryption, added a second focus on securing SMTP email transmissions between mailservers. We believe this is a vital protection against non-targeted\u00a0dragnet surveillance<\/a>\u00a0by the US andother governments<\/a>. In the months after we started rating their support for\u00a0STARTTLS email encryption<\/a>, a number of major sites including Yahoo!, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook deployed this form of backbone email encryption. Microsoft’s deployments is in progress. We believe that most or all of these companies made these changes in response to EFF’s Encrypt the Web report.<\/p>\n

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\"EncryptionSMTPS coverage at Gmail since December 2013<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Today, Google, which led the email ecosystem with early adoption of STARTTLS and HTTPS, has\u00a0published its own datasets<\/a>\u00a0on the amount of email that is encrypted in transit between Gmail and other email providers. This\u00a0data<\/a>\u00a0shows that (averaging Google’s inbound and outbound numbers) backbone encryption has risen from 33% to 58% since December last year.1<\/a>\u00a0A Facebook\u00a0snapshot<\/a>\u00a0from two weeks ago shows a similar story. But there is also more work to do. More mail operators need to implement STARTTLS, and some of those that already support STARTTLS need to upgrade their servers to support modern ciphers and forward secrecy.<\/p>\n

If your organization runs a mail server, make sure STARTTLS is enabled and\u00a0check that it is configured correctly<\/a>\u00a0today.<\/p>\n