As part of Microsoft's new privacy initiative, Outlook and OneDrive have also gotten encryption enhancements.

Sara Peters, Senior Editor

July 1, 2014

1 Min Read

Microsoft today opened its first Microsoft Transparency Center, in Redmond, and made other announcements about how it's improving security and privacy.

The software giant also has expanded its encryption options in Outlook.com and OneDrive. Outlook is now protected by TLS encryption for outbound and inbound email. This does, however, require that the email service provider used by both the sender and the receiver support TLS.

For sending and receiving mail between email providers, Outlook.com has also enabled Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) encryption, which uses a different encryption key for every connection. PFS has also been enabled by OneDrive, so that users can get forward secrecy when accessing OneDrive through onedrive.love.com, the OneDrive mobile app, and sync clients.

Microsoft's transparency center was created to ease the minds of foreign governments that are afraid the US government has inserted backdoors into commercial software. Participating governments will be allowed to review source code for the main products coming out of Redmond, so they can check for backdoors themselves. (Another transparency center that will be located in Brussels is under development.)

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About the Author(s)

Sara Peters

Senior Editor

Sara Peters is Senior Editor at Dark Reading and formerly the editor-in-chief of Enterprise Efficiency. Prior that she was senior editor for the Computer Security Institute, writing and speaking about virtualization, identity management, cybersecurity law, and a myriad of other topics. She authored the 2009 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey and founded the CSI Working Group on Web Security Research Law -- a collaborative project that investigated the dichotomy between laws regulating software vulnerability disclosure and those regulating Web vulnerability disclosure.


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