I have just returned from the Messaging, Mobile and Malware Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) meeting in Philadelphia. Despite the long-winded title, the M3AAWG event is actually short on rhetoric, instead focusing on practical solutions to the problems of abuse, security and privacy, particularly for operators of consumer-oriented communications platforms such as ISPs, hosting companies and OTT players such as Facebook and Google. As a provider of communication and collaboration software to service providers, we at Open-Xchange find participation in M3AAWG to be particularly valuable, especially since this week’s meeting was held jointly with the i2Coalition (of which Open-Xchange is also a member).
Because M3AAWG meetings are based around open debate of difficult issues, discussion of the exact content of meetings is rightly restricted, but I can say that several of the areas of discussion were extremely relevant to my own concerns and those of our customers. One of the M3AAWG Special Interest Groups (SIGs) focuses on Pervasive Monitoring, and several sessions were focused on this, including debates on the merits of the latest proposals for improving end-to-end encryption, and improving the trust of encrypted email transport. The latter topic will be familiar to readers of this blog, as it is the main focus of the Trusted Email Services (TES) initiative that Open-Xchange is part of. I also enjoyed a discussion on the final day of the meeting on multi-factor authentication, which is a vital technology that we will be adding to OX App Suite in the near future.
I look forward to the next M3AAWG meeting, which will be held in Paris in October, as well OX contributing in the meantime to the excellent work done by both M3AAWG and the i2Coalition.
