Microsoft announced a set of security enhancements to its major cloud services and the opening of a Transparency Center on its campus in Redmond, Washington. Highlights of the announcement include:
- Enhanced message encryption in Office 365 as well as Azure’s addition of ExpressRoute, a service that enables businesses to create private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure on their premises or in a colocation environment.
- Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption is now enabled in Outlook.com for both outbound and inbound email.
- Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) encryption support is now enabled in Outlook.com for sending and receiving mail between email providers. Forward secrecy uses a different encryption key for every connection, making it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections.
- OneDrive has now enabled PFS encryption support as well. 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.
- The new Microsoft Transparency Center provides participating governments with the ability to review source code for the company’s key product. This is meant to assure software integrity and confirm there are no “back doors.” Microsoft plans to open addition Transparency Centers in other locations, including Brussels.