This is all part of its promise to deliver better encryption and transparency

Jul 1, 2014 20:27 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has just announced a series of improvements for OneDrive and Outlook.com, thus delivering on its promise to provide consumers with enhanced protection and transparency for some of its key products.

Starting today, Outlook.com accounts are protected by TLS (Transport Layer Security) for both incoming and outgoing emails, which means that all sent messages are automatically encrypted as it travels between Microsoft's servers and the receiver's, if they use TLS.

The company says that this particular feature has been made possible after intensive work with a number of international mail services, including Deutsche Telekom, Yandex and Mail.Ru, which helped test TLS support and determine whether email is indeed encrypted.

“Over the past six months, we have been working across the industry to further protect and help ensure your mail remains protected. This is a significant engineering effort given the large number of services Microsoft offers and the hundreds of millions of customers we serve around the world,” Matt Thomlinson, vice president, Trustworthy Computing Security, Microsoft, said in a statement.

At the same time, Outlook.com also benefits from PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) which adds a new layer of protection when sending and receiving emails from a Microsoft account.

“Forward secrecy uses a different encryption key for every connection, making it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections,” the company explained.

OneDrive also has PFS encryption starting today, Microsoft revealed, which means that all those who are storing files in the cloud get increased protection when loggging in not only through the web interface, but also via mobile apps.

“OneDrive customers now automatically get forward secrecy when accessing OneDrive through onedrive.live.com, our mobile OneDrive application and our sync clients. As with Outlook.com’s email transfer, this makes it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections between their systems and OneDrive,” Thomlinson explained.

As we've told you earlier today, Microsoft has also announced the opening of a transparency center supposed to allow governments across the world analyze the source code of various products, including the Windows operating system and Skype, to make sure that no hidden back doors are implemented. This is clearly supposed to fight recent claims that Microsoft has implemented hidden code in its software to spy on its users and collaborate with US agencies on that.

Redmond said that more such centers would open soon in other locations across the world, so expect more announcements on this in the coming months in various countries.