Microsoft has announced that it is taking various step including data encryption process for Protecting customer data from government snooping.
Brad Smith, General Counsel of Microsoft had written a detailed plan about its step to prevent government snooping.
Though he didn’t specifically mention “NSA”, he had said that Microsoft was alarmed by allegations that “some governments” had collected customer data from the Internet without warrants.
He is telling about below three action items for preventing such snooping activities.
- Expanding encryption across Microsoft services.
- Reinforcing legal protections for customers’ data.
- Enhancing the transparency of software code, making it easier for customers to reassure themselves that Microsoft products do not contain back doors.
Brand Smith says Microsoft will pursue a comprehensive engineering effort to strengthen the encryption of customer data across networks and services. This effort will include major communications, productivity and developer services such as Outlook.com, Office 365, SkyDrive and Windows Azure, and will provide protection across the full lifecycle of customer-created content.
More specifically:
· Customer content moving between customers and Microsoft will be encrypted by default.
· All of key platform, productivity and communications services will encrypt customer content as it moves between Microsoft data centers.
· Microsoft will use best-in-class industry cryptography to protect these channels, including Perfect Forward Secrecy and 2048-bit key lengths.
· All of this will be in place by the end of 2014, and much of it is effective immediately.
· Microsoft will encrypt customer content that it stores. In some cases, such as third-party services developed to run on Windows Azure, Microsoft will leave the choice to developers, but will offer the tools to allow them to easily protect data.
· Microsoft is working with other companies across the industry to ensure that data traveling between services – from one email provider to another, for instance – is protected.
