Microsoft Transparency Center debuts, Outlook and OneDrive receive better security encryption

Microsoft has revealed today that they have taken steps to ensure security and transparency, especially when it comes to the company’s products and services. On top of that, Microsoft has opened up the very first Microsoft Transparency Center at the Redmond, Washington campus.

“We are in the midst of a comprehensive engineering effort to strengthen encryption across our networks and services. Our goal is to provide even greater protection for data across all the great Microsoft services you use and depend on every day. This effort also helps us reinforce that governments use appropriate legal processes, not technical brute force, if they want access to that data,” Microsoft stated in an official blog post.

Outlook.com is now further protected by Transport Layer Security, or TLS, encryption for both outbound and inbound email. This basically means that when you send an email to someone, it is encrypted and better protected as it travels between Microsoft and other email providers — granted the email service provider also supports TLS. 

OneDrive, on the other hand, has now enabled PFS encryption support. Attackers will now find it much more difficult to decrypt connections between systems and OneDrive. Customers will automatically get forward secrecy when accessing OneDrive via the website, mobile apps, or sync clients.

“Over the past six months, we have been working across the industry to further protect and help ensure your mail remains protected. This includes working closely with several international providers throughout our implementation, including, Deutsche Telekom, Yandex and Mail.Ru to test and help ensure that mail stays encrypted in transit to and from each email service,” Microsoft explained.

The company has also launched the very first Transparency Center, allowing government agency the ability to review source code for key products to ensure it is secure. “Our Transparency Centers provide participating governments with the ability to review source code for our key products, assure themselves of their software integrity, and confirm there are no “back doors.” The Redmond location is the first in a number of regional transparency centers that we plan to open,” Microsoft explains.

Microsoft reaffirms its commitment of increasing consumer data protection while increasing transparency in the process.