Yahoo Mail will receive end-to-end encryption by 2015

Yahoo is following in the footsteps of Google and plans to implement end-to-end encryption into Yahoo Mail by 2015. Like Google, Yahoo plans to use the OpenPGP encryption standard to encrypt messages. OpenPGP, which is the gold standard for email encryption, uses a public-private keypair scheme to protect user messages. To get the encryption done, Yahoo will use a modified version of Google’s alpha stage End-to-End Chrome extension. But Yahoo’s version will be designed to work with the Yahoo Mail interface instead of Gmail. Yahoo also plans on making encryption a native part of the Yahoo Mail mobile apps, according to a tweet by Alex Stamos, Yahoo’s chief information security officer. Stamos announced Yahoo’s email encryption plans during Black Hat USA, a security conference that ended on Thursday. As part of the encryption effort, Yahoo will create a new privacy engineering team to work on the project. The team’s first hire was Yan Zhu, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who worked on projects such as the HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger add-ons. Zhu was also the person who recently discovered a security flaw in WordPress login cookies.