Google provides client-side encryption to Gmail and Calendar. Do you have to care?

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On Tuesday, Google made client-side encryption accessible to a restricted set of Gmail and Calendar customers in a transfer designed to present them extra management over who sees delicate communications and schedules.

Shopper-side encryption is a generic time period for any kind of encryption that’s utilized to information earlier than it’s despatched from a consumer system to a server. With server-side encryption, in contrast, the consumer system sends the info to a central server, which then makes use of keys in its possession to encrypt it whereas it’s saved. That is what Google does at present. (To be clear, the info is distributed encrypted by way of HTTPS, however it’s decrypted as quickly as Google receives it.)

Google’s client-side encryption occupies a center floor between the 2. Knowledge is encrypted on the consumer system earlier than being despatched (by HTTPS) to Google. The info can solely be decrypted on an endpoint machine with the identical key utilized by the sender. This gives an incremental profit for the reason that information will stay unreadable to any malicious Google insiders or hackers who handle to compromise Google servers.