Last week Google released E2EMail, “a Gmail client that exchanges OpenPGP mail.” Google’s documentation promises that “Any email sent from the app is also automatically signed and encrypted… The target is a simple user experience — install app, approve permissions, start reading or send sending messages.” Trailrunner7 quotes On The Wire:
People have been trying to find a replacement for PGP almost since the day it was released, and with limited success. Encrypted email is still difficult to use and painful to implement in most cases, but Google has just released a Chrome plugin designed to address those problems.
The new E2EMail extension doesn’t turn a user’s Gmail inbox into an encrypted mail client. Rather, it is a replacement that gives users a separate inbox for encrypted messages. The system is built on Google’s end-to-end encryption library, and the company has released E2EMail as an open-source project.
Wired quotes a web security researcher who calls the open sourcing “a telltale sign the project isn’t going anywhere. This is a way for them to get their work out there but to absolve themselves of future obligations.” But Google’s privacy and security product manager responds that they’re tackling some very thorny issues like secure key handling, and “The reason we want to put this into the open source community is precisely because everyone cares about this so much. We don’t want everyone waiting for Google to get something done.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
https://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discuss&id=10320963&smallembed=1