Making end-to-end encryption easier to use

googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com

78 points·kjhughes··8 comments

"We recognize that this sort of encryption will probably only be used for very sensitive messages or by those who need added protection. But we hope that the End-to-End extension will make it quicker and easier for people to get that extra layer of security should they need it."

We should all use this as much as possible. If not for anything else, then to make the people who really need it seem less suspicious.

That is quite a dissapointing attitude. Everyone would use it if a) it was easy. And b) if they weren't being mislead by providers that their email is so secure.

This could be a big deal; I can see many people using this, including me. People are generally reluctant to try end-to-end because it is rather confusing to install.

Is it FOSS? Other browsers could use this technology.

Yes, Apache 2.0

https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/

And there's more discussion on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7842233

Or maybe they could support native clients better instead of putting crypto in everyone's favourite infection vector.

What's a native client do if Google still stores all your emails, receives all your email's, etc. It's not like once you read the email in your client Google forgets it ever saw the email.....

A native client has advantages over a browser extension. For mobile devices, there isn't much choice except to use a native client for email. But that would mean open sourcing the client, if that's how you read the cleartext.

Google needs a few more pieces, like Web-of-trust facilitates by social connections and real time communication, but this is a good first step.

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