Yahoo joins Google to boost email security

Yahoo says it plans to work with Google to create a secure email system by next year to make it almost impossible for hackers or government officials to read users' messages, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The move comes as tech giants join hands to strengthen their defences against government intrusion and hacking, after Edward Snowden last year exposed the NSA's mass surveillance programmes.

Google, Microsoft and Facebook Inc moved to encrypt internal traffic following revelations by Snowden that the secret agency had hacked into their connections overseas. The companies also had smaller adjustments that together made mass collection difficult.

Yahoo had altered its email introducing encryption type messages in a separate window, which prevented even Yahoo from reading the messages while they were being typed, according to the Journal.

Yesterday, Google said it was encouraging website developers to enhance security of web sites by using site encryption as one of the factors to determine search ranking (See: Google to promote https over http sites in search results).

Meanwhile, Forbes reported that Yahoo had retained respected security researcher Alex Stamos to upgrade its practices, and the results had been relatively swift, with a roll-out of encryption on Yahoo's services starting in April.

Stamos disclosed yesterday that Yahoo planned to roll out end-to-end encryption to Yahoo mail, following Google's move. Starting this fall, Yahoo users would be able to send messages to other Yahoo mail and Gmail users that would make no sense to others apart from the sender and the recipient.

''If an activist in Sudan wants to email a human rights organization's gmail address and they have encryption set up for it, it will automatically detect that and offer them the option to encrypt,'' said Stamos, who emphasised that encryption technologies needed to offer easy way to secure messages.

Yahoo planned to modify the end-to-end encryption plug-in that had been developed by Google. The company had hired privacy engineer Yan Zhu from privasy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation to help develop the technology.

Zhu had attended a mathematics conference this year to dissuade promising cryptologists and mathematicians from joining the NSA in view of the issues related to civil liberties that had come to the fore at the time.