Google to Release Chrome Extension For Encryption

Google to release Chrome extension for encryption soon!. More than half a year ago, Google announced that it was working on an email encryption Chrome plugin that would make it very easy for anybody to encrypt their emails. Now, it looks like this tool is getting a bit closer to launch.

Email encryption has always been a nightmare to use. That’s not so much because public-key cryptography is all that complex, but mostly because nobody ever really figured out how to make it easy for mainstream users. Mailvelope is one of the easier Chrome plugins to use to encrypt email right now and that still assumes at least some basic understanding of the concepts behind it.

End-to-End is a Chrome extension based on OpenPGP that should, once complete, ensure data that leaves a browser remains encrypted until it reaches the intended recipient. It would improve users’ privacy when using services like Gmail, which encrypts messages from the browser until it reaches Google’s servers, but once it arrives there the message can still be exposed to government access requests.

Google says it won’t release an open alpha of End-to-End until it has fully solved all the usability problems around key distribution, but it looks like the team is expecting a launch sometime next year.