Email supports TLS (Transport Layer Security), what we used to call SSL. Unlike the web, which split it’s TLS support off into a completely different protocol – https, listening on port 443 vs http listening on port 80 – SMTP implements it inside it’s non-encrypted protocol. A mailserver advertises that it supports this by having the word “STARTTLS” in the...
The US National Cybersecurity Assessments & Technical Services Team have issued a mandate on web and email security, including TLS+HSTS for web servers, and STARTTLS+SPF+DKIM+DMARC for email. It’s … pretty decent for a brief, public requirements doc. It’s compatible with a prudent rollout of email authentication. Set up a centralized reporting repository for DMARC failure...
About a month ago someone posted a heavily elided screenshot that they claimed was evidence of their ISP, AT&T, sabotaging SMTP connections being sent over their network, meaning that anyone could sniff their passwords and traffic. This is it: Most email people looking at that saw the asterisks in the banner and went “Oh. That’s not the ISP tampering with the...
Yesterday I talked about STARTTLS deployment, and how it was a good thing to support to help protect the privacy of your recipients. STARTTLS is just one aspect of protecting email from eavesdropping; encrypting traffic as the mail is being sent or read and encrypting the message itself using PGP or S/MIME are others. This table shows what approaches protect messages at different stages of the...
You probably use TLS hundreds of times a day. If you don’t recognize the term, you might know it better by it’s older name, SSL. TLS is what protects your data in transit whenever you go to Google, or Yahoo or even this blog. The little padlock in your browser address bar tells you that your browser has used the TLS protocol to do two things. First, it’s decided that the server...
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