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Improved Security for Outlook and OneDrive

July 30, 2014

Last December Microsoft promised to improve security for its cloud services through the use of encryption. Even Edward Snowden said that encryption is your friend when it comes to protecting disclosure of your data.

Ars technica posted that Outlook.com will now use TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption when sending and receiving messages with other servers that also support TLS. Think of TLS as having a https:// connection between e-mail servers (not really, but it is easier for most people to understand). In addition, Outlook.com and OneDrive (previously known as SkyDrive) have been updated to use perfect forward security (PFS), where the keys are randomly generated for each session. That’s a good thing. Law enforcement or a hacker can only decode one communication session if they obtain the key. This stops the bulk and long-term access with other encryption schemes.

All of this is good news and will help protect our data transmissions from unwanted access. It is good to see that more and more vendors are taking Google’s approach of encrypting everything.

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