Lessons learned while protecting Gmail

Posted by Elie Bursztein - anti-abuse & security research, Nicolas Lidzborski - Gmail security engineering, and Vijay Eranti - Gmail anti-abuse engineering

Earlier this year in San Francisco, USENIX hosted their inaugural Enigma Conference, which focused on security, privacy and electronic crime through the lens of emerging threats and novel attacks. We were excited to help make this conference happen and to participate in it.

At the conference, we heard from a variety of terrific speakers including:

• Ron Rivest, Professor at MIT and inventor of RSA, who spoke about the consequences of backdooring encryption
• Rob Joyce, Chief of the NSA Tailored Access Operations organization, who spoke about about defending against state attackers
• George “Geohot” Hotz, Hacker extraordinaire, who discussed state of the art software debugging

In addition, we were able to share the lessons we’ve learned about protecting Gmail users since it was launched over a decade ago. Those lessons are summarized in the infographic below (the talk slides are also available).
We were proud to sponsor this year's inaugural Enigma conference, and it is our hope that the core lessons that we have learned over the years can benefit other online products and services. We're looking forward to participating again next year when Enigma returns in 2017. We hope to see you there!