According to
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/1...ngrade-attacks
"Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers' data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.1
By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the
servers will proceed to send email unencrypted [...]"
I thought STARTTLS was between
client and server and that all transmission of email between servers/relays was in plaintext anyway (or unadulterated transmission of that which has already been encrypted via PGP etc)... no?
If someone could clarify I'd be grateful
Thanks
G