Yahoo has announced it will start to offer a plugin that will add end-to-end encryption to Yahoo's webmail service. The company has released the sourcecode of the plugin already and hopes to release a final version later his year. Besides adding end-to-end encryption for email, the company also introduced another security feature, Yahoo will introduce a service that sends login codes per SMS.
The company has released the sourcecode of its "End-to-End" plugin hoping experts will provide feedback. The company also hopes that other mail providers will follow its example. The plugin is a fork of Google's similar End-to-End extension which the company released to open-source hosting platform Github last year. This tool makes encrypting and decrypting of emails for webmail possible and is based on OpenPGP.
Besides that, Yahoo will also start with a service called "On-demand" passwords. To make use of this, users have to login to their Yahoo account and select that they want to receive login codes on their cell phone. The next time they login to their Yahoo account they can click a "send my password" button. Yahoo then sends them a four-digit code which allows users to login to their webmail account.
This feature is only available for American users for now.
