Google scrambles to block backdoors

The ongoing revelations about NSA snoopery have prompted The Chocolate Factory to accelerate its effort to encrypt user data at every possible point.

Mountain View had already announced that its Google Cloud Storage platform was adding server-side encryption to reassure users. User data uploaded to the service is now being encrypted using AES-128 in RAM before being written to disk.

Now, according to the Washington Post, Google is also planning to encrypt data travelling between all of its data centres. The company's security engineering VP Eric Grosse described encryption as “an arms race” and told the newspaper government agencies are “among the most skilled players in this game”.