Some big IT propose a more secure email system

The email communication is now used by several decades the system (just in recent weeks has shut down its creator, Ray Tomlinson, who in the early 70's has created the e-mail) and the transport to its core technology, the SMTP , was almost unchanged in over forty years.

Via SMTP most email is sent in plain text, unencrypted, a problem is not insignificant when you consider that today's email is exchanged private and commercial information of a certain confidentiality.

To try to solve this problem several years ago was created the SMTP mechanism SARTTLS, however, on which has enjoyed wide adoption also because of numerous flaws present in it, not least the inability to really ensure that messages sent were actually protected by encryption.

This technology offers even opens the way to a man-in-the-middle attacks, especially before an email is sent notifying the sender that there is no active SSL so that the client send the message unencrypted without warning .

A collaboration between engineers at Google, Yahoo, Comcast, Microsoft, LinkedIn and 1 & 1 Mail & Media has sent a proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force that will solve this problem in a more robust fashion: it's SMTP HTTP Strict Transport Security which provides a control some items before the email is sent.

In particular, the sending client would go to check if the target server supports SMTP technology STS and if the certificate is valid and updated, so as to ensure that it established a communication channel with the correct server. If the controls were to fail, the message will not be sent and will be communicated to the user. The proposal, which is available here, contains numerous technical details for a possible practical implementation.

It is, for now, only a proposal that could also not find concrete application: the presence of some great web reality, however, bodes well for its possible implementation in a not too distant future.