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Journalism of Courage
Gmail will soon warn users when they receive messages from unencrypted connections, according to an announcement on Google’s Official security blog.
Google’s team wrote on the blog, “To notify our users of potential dangers, we are developing in-product warnings for Gmail users that will display when they receive a message through a non-encrypted connection. These warnings will begin to roll-out in the coming months.”
Google’s Gmail was part of a research, done in partnership with the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois, which looked at how email security has evolved. The study shows that 80 per cent of email sent out to other ids via Gmail was encrypted, while 60 per cent of mail coming into Gmail inboxes from other services was encrypted.
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Google also says that more than 94 per cent of inbound messages to Gmail carry some form of authentication.
In their blogspot, Google’s security team also identified challenges to email security.
Google notes that they have “found regions of the Internet” which actively prevent requests to initiate secure SSL connections. Google goes on to say that “they are working closely with partners through the industry association M3AAWG to strengthen ‘opportunistic TLS’ using technologies” to protect websites against such interception.
Gmail’s team also discovered “malicious DNS servers publishing bogus routing information to email servers looking for Gmail.” The blog notes that while this style of attack is rare, it poses a particularly serious threat as these malicious DNS servers could alter or censor messages before the recipient gets them.
