A team of independent researchers better safetys along with major tech companies in Silicon Valley filed last Friday, March 18, 2016, a proposal for a new electronic protocol post officey called SMTP STS (Strict Transport Security).
The SMTP there never was one safe protocol, mainly because at the time it was invented in 1982, online surveillance wasn't much of a problem among the few thousand computers connected to the Internet at the time.
As the Web was growing, and hackers first appeared, and then space criminals, technology companies brought the STARTTLS extension to STMP as a method of using encrypted channels to send emails.
Unfortunately, STARTTLS was never as safe as originally planned, mainly due to a series of design flaws that allowed attackers to fool the servers to tell their email sender that they do not support encryption and that they should send the data to plain text .
This is exactly the hole security researchers are trying to fix with this new extension of the SMTP protocol called STS.
In theory, this new extension looks like HTTPS's HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) extension. Just like HSTS, SMTP STS checks the confidentiality of the message and the authenticity of the server and thus proceeds to the startup process of an encrypted e-mail communication channel.
STMP STS will allow to two servers engaged in e-mail exchange to cryptographically validate each other, and decide in a secure manner whether to use encryption, whether encryption is supported, and what to do if it is not.
Among the biggest names of companies participating in this effort are Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Comcast. Currently, the proposal is only a draft specification to the IEEE (Internet Engineering Task Force), but judging by how many large companies are involved, chances are we'll see it as an official specification very soon.
Last year, Oracle had submitted a similar proposal called DEEP (Deployable Enhanced Email Privacy).
