Yahoo Encrypting Data In Wake of NSA Revelations

Nerval's Lobster writes "Following reports that the NSA aggressively targets Google and Yahoo servers for surveillance, Yahoo is working to encrypt much of the data flowing through its datacenters. 'As you know, there have been a number of reports over the last six months about the U.S. government secretly accessing user data without the knowledge of tech companies, including Yahoo,' Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wrote in a Nov. 18 blog posting. 'I want to reiterate what we have said in the past: Yahoo has never given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.' In order to make Yahoo's systems more secure, she added, the company is introducing SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption to Yahoo Mail with a 2048-bit key. That security measure will supposedly be in place by January 8, 2014. Beyond that, Yahoo plans on encrypting all information that moves between its datacenters by the end of the first quarter of 2014. Around that same time, the company will give users the option to encrypt all data flowing to and from Yahoo; it will also 'work closely with our international Mail partners to ensure that Yahoo co-branded Mail accounts are https-enabled,' Mayer wrote. (While it's not a crushing expense for massive companies such as Yahoo, introducing this sort of security does add to infrastructure and engineering costs, and takes time to actually put in place.)"

Comments

Which Encryption Scheme is Safest? Can we tell?

[Press2ToContinue]

Not mentioned was which encryption schemes Yahoo is considering. Maybe it's simply HTTPS, but is that good enough? Are there other possibilities?

Since the NSA has backdoored encryption schemes in the past, how can Yahoo determine if the scheme they implement is actually going to prevent the NSA from decrypting it? It's a serious question, and you can patly answer "you can't", but if I were responsible for implementing this scheme, this is the question I would pose to the team and require some sincere digging because it would be an even bigger embarrassment to implement the encryption, and then read another Snowden-esque revelation showing it was for nothing, and I was made a fool of.

Re:Which Encryption Scheme is Safest? Can we tell?

[swb]

Most of the SANs I've seen support disk encryption and IPSec encryption between the SAN and the host or OS talking to it. If your OS writes encrypted data to storage (encrypted filesystem) as well, you have two layers of encryption on the platter and two layers of encryption in transit.

Of course that doesn't address weaknesses in ciphers or key exchange systems, but it seems like it would make it a lot harder to get at the data because the only place it is decrypted is during interprocess communication (decrypting from the filesystem and before re-encrypting it for final transit to client).

Not that this trivializes that risk, but it seems to make it a lot tougher.

Re:Yahoo can't even keep spam out of my inbox

[Dahamma]

While I would have agreed with you two weeks ago, bizarrely, I have recently started getting a ton of spam in my Gmail account - really obvious stuff that should have been filtered. And Yahoo has been almost perfect filtering the same crap. Several people I have talked to have noticed the same thing. It's almost like someone at Google accidentally turned off the spam filter...