Several months after pledging to beef up encryption across its services, Microsoft today announced some new security protections for Outlook.com and OneDrive.
Outlook.com is now cloaked in Transport Layer Security (TLS), cryptographic protocols used to safeguard data traveling between users. “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,” Microsoft said, provided the recipient’s email service also has TLS support.
“Over the past six months, we have been working across the industry to further protect and help ensure your mail remains protected. This includes working closely with several international providers throughout our 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.”
Additionally, Outlook.com also now supports Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) encryption specifically for mail transiting between different email providers. A different encryption key is used for each connection, thus making it more difficult to intercept.
Also, OneDrive, the cloud-based storage service formerly known as Skydrive, now supports PFS encryption too, which is enabled automatically when a user accesses the service through onedrive.live.com or its mobile apps.