A group of privacy and security experts sent a letter today urging Google to strengthen its leadership role in web application security, and we wanted to offer some of our thoughts on the subject.
Let's take a closer look at how this works in the case of Gmail. We know that tens of millions of Gmail users rely on it to manage their lives every day, and we have offered HTTPS access as an option in Gmail from the day we launched. If you choose to use HTTPS in Gmail, our systems are designed to maintain it throughout the email session — not just at login — so everything you do can be passed through a more secure connection. Last summer we made it even easier by letting Gmail users opt in to always use HTTPS every time they log in (no need to type or bookmark the "https").
We're planning a trial in which we'll move small samples of different types of Gmail users to HTTPS to see what their experience is, and whether it affects the performance of their email. Does it load fast enough? Is it responsive enough? Are there particular regions, or networks, or computer setups that do particularly poorly on HTTPS?
Unless there are negative effects on the user experience or it's otherwise impractical, we intend to turn on HTTPS by default more broadly, hopefully for all Gmail users. We're also considering how to make this work best for other apps including Google Docs and Google Calendar (we offer free HTTPS for those apps as well).
Stay tuned, but we wanted to share our thinking on this, and to let you know we're always looking at ways to make the web more secure and more useful.
Update @ 1:00pm: We've had some more time to go through the report. There's a factual inaccuracy we wanted to point out: a cookie from Docs or Calendar doesn't give access to a Gmail session. The master authentication cookie is always sent over HTTPS — whether or not the user specified HTTPS-only for their Gmail account. But we can all agree on the benefits of HTTPS, and we're glad that the report recognizes our leadership role in this area. As the report itself points out, "Users of Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook and MySpace are also vulnerable to [data theft and account hijacking]. Worst of all — these firms do not offer their customers any form of protection. Google at least offers its tech savvy customers a strong degree of protection from snooping attacks." We take security very seriously, and we're proud of our record of providing security for free web apps.
Update on June 26th: We've sent a response to the signatories of the letter. You can read it here.
Update @ 1:00pm: We've had some more time to go through the report. There's a factual inaccuracy we wanted to point out: a cookie from Docs or Calendar doesn't give access to a Gmail session. The master authentication cookie is always sent over HTTPS — whether or not the user specified HTTPS-only for their Gmail account. But we can all agree on the benefits of HTTPS, and we're glad that the report recognizes our leadership role in this area. As the report itself points out, "Users of Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook and MySpace are also vulnerable to [data theft and account hijacking]. Worst of all — these firms do not offer their customers any form of protection. Google at least offers its tech savvy customers a strong degree of protection from snooping attacks." We take security very seriously, and we're proud of our record of providing security for free web apps.
Update on June 26th: We've sent a response to the signatories of the letter. You can read it here.
0 blogger-facebook:
إرسال تعليق