Yahoo Works On Encrypting Their Services

The whole issue of personal privacy when it comes to emails as well as instant messages is a topic that is close to the hearts of many. After all, no one likes to have their conversation eavesdropped upon, and so the same applies to digital conversations and communication. The folks over at Yahoo have just shared progress on a huge project that would have seen the full encryption of traffic shifting between Yahoo data centers at the end of last month.

Earlier in January this year, we brought you word that Yahoo Mail is more secure thanks to browsing over HTTPS being the default setting. Apart from that, Yahoo has also enabled encryption of mail between our servers and other mail providers that support the SMTPTLS standard in the past month. Basically, the Yahoo Homepage as well as the entire slew of search queries which run on the Yahoo Homepage, in addition to majority of Yahoo properties would also come with HTTPS encryption enabled by default.

The latest in security best-practices, including supporting TLS 1.2, Perfect Forward Secrecy and a 2048-bit RSA key, have been put in place, and Yahoo intends to bring all Yahoo sites up to this standard eventually. You can initiate an encrypted session for Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, and Good Morning America on Yahoo (gma.yahoo.com) simply by typing “https” right before the site URL in your web browser, and there will be a new, encrypted, version of Yahoo Messenger arriving in the months ahead, too. [Press Release]

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Yahoo