Send Secure to Any Email Address
With Encyro, you can send messages and attached files securely to any email address. Your recipient need not be an Encyro user and they will not be required to sign up for an Encyro account.
What is Secure
The message and attached files are secure in the sense that your data stays confidential. It is very difficult for someone other than you or your recipient to read the data because the data stays encrypted. The primary purpose of this type of security is to prevent data breaches for businesses and prevent identity theft for individuals.
Security convers three aspects:
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Encyption in transit: Your message is encrypted at your device and only leaves your device in encrypted form. It travels over the network in encrypted form. Data is sent encrypted to each of your recipients as well. Data traveling over a network cable or wireless connection can be intercepted by attackers. Such attacks are easy these days and require less than $50 of tiny hardware modules that can be attached in a few minutes to a network cable when the attacker has access to such a cable from a network service provider, such as in street-side communication equipment boxes, business offices, or other locations. However, when data is encrypted, the attackers who obtain the data cannot read it.
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Encryption in storage: Your data is stored encrypted on Encyro’s servers. Further, we use a different encryption key for storage than used for sending the data over the network. That way, even if one of your recipients has a virus infected computer that steals the encryption key from their device, that key can only be used to decrypt the data sent to that one user. Your other data stored at Encyro’s servers stays secure.
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Protection on device: Many encrypted email products decrypt the data when it arrives at your device or computer. Here it may be stored without encryption, such as in your Inbox folder or Sent-mail folder. However, Encyro does not automatically store your messages on your device. You simply access the messages through the web. Hence, only the selected attachments that you explicitly download will be saved to your device, and not all your sent and received messages. This enhances protection, especially for users accessing their secure messages from mobile devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets) because those devices can more easily be stolen or lost.
What is not secure?
Once you download a file from your Encyro account to a computer or other device, Encyro can no longer protect it. That is why we recommend that your devices themselves use encryption for any data stored on the device. Free encryption products such as VeraCrypt can be used if your operating system does not have built-in encryption. For instance, on Windows, only the Pro or Ultimate versions offer BitLocker but not the Windows Home versions. Detailed steps to encrypt your computer and smartphones are provided in the section titled Device Encryption in this article.
Another point to note is that encryption does not protect you against someone who can pretend to be you. If someone can login with your password, they will be treated as you and given access to all data. So it is important to protect your devices with passwords. A few simple steps to take are described in the section titled Device Access Control of this article.
Receive Securely from Others
You can also receive secure messages or files from others who do not have an Encyro account, using the Encyro upload page as explained here.