Microsoft is moving toward a major new effort to encrypt its Internet traffic amid fears that the National Security Agency may have broken into its global communications links, said people familiar with the emerging plans.
Suspicions at Microsoft, while building for several months, sharpened in October when it was reported that the NSA was intercepting traffic inside the private networks of Google and Yahoo, two industry rivals with similar global infrastructures, said people with direct knowledge of the company’s deliberations. They said top Microsoft executives are meeting this week to decide what encryption initiatives to deploy and how quickly.
Documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggest — but do not prove — that the company is right to be concerned. Two previously unreleased slides that describe operations against Google and Yahoo include references to Microsoft’s Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger services.
Microsoft’s move to expand encryption would allow it to join Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other major technology firms in hardening their defenses in response to news reports about once-secret NSA programs.
Although several legislative efforts are underway to curb the NSA’s surveillance powers, the wholesale move by private companies to expand the use of encryption technology may prove to be the most tangible outcome of months of revelations based on documents that Snowden provided to The Washington Post and Britain’s The Guardian newspaper. In another major shift, the companies also are explicitly building defenses against U.S. government surveillance programs, in addition to combating hackers, criminals and foreign intelligence services.
“That’s a pretty big change in the way these companies have operated,” said Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins University cryptography expert. “And it’s a big engineering effort.”
