Google introduced that it’s going to undertake the IETF’s Message Layer Safety (MLS) customary in its Messages app on Android, a transfer that would result in dramatic safety and interoperability advantages.
“Most trendy client messaging platforms (together with Google Messages) assist end-to-end encryption, however customers right now are restricted to speaking with contacts who use the identical platform,” Google’s Giles Hogben explains. “For interoperability to reach apply, nevertheless, laws should be mixed with open, industry-vetted, requirements, significantly within the space of privateness, safety, and end-to-end encryption.”
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One such customary, MLS, could maintain the important thing to a safe, cross-platform, interoperable future during which competing messaging options can seamlessly talk with one another. As Hogben notes, MLS is sensible, scalable, and versatile, and it will possibly even deal with rising threats to consumer privateness and safety, together with quantum computing.
As such, Google will implement MLS in its Messages app and can assist unfold its use by open-sourcing its implementation in Android in order that others can undertake it extra simply as effectively. There’s no timetable for this work, nor any point out of how or whether or not it might affect Wealthy Communication Companies (RCS), one other cellular customary that Google implements in Messages and has promoted as a cross-platform resolution. (To little impact exterior of Android.)
