New Update iMessage gets a major makeover that puts it on equal footing with Signal

[MuzzMelbourne]

iMessage is getting a major makeover that makes it among the two messaging apps most prepared to withstand the coming advent of quantum computing, largely at parity with Signal or arguably incrementally more hardened.


On Wednesday, Apple said messages sent through iMessage will now be protected by two forms of end-to-end encryption (E2EE), whereas before, it had only one. The encryption being added, known as PQ3, is an implementation of a new algorithm called Kyber that, unlike the algorithms iMessage has used until now, can’t be broken with quantum computing. Apple isn’t replacing the older quantum-vulnerable algorithm with PQ3—it's augmenting it. That means, for the encryption to be broken, an attacker will have to crack both.

iMessage gets a major makeover that puts it on equal footing with Signal

How Kybers and ratcheting are boosting the resiliency of Apple's messaging app.

arstechnica.com

 

[SpiderWeb]

Very impressed by Apple. Full security blog post here:

Blog - iMessage with PQ3: The new state of the art in quantum-secure messaging at scale - Apple Security Research

We are introducing PQ3, a groundbreaking cryptographic protocol for iMessage that advances the state of the art of end-to-end secure messaging. With compromise-resilient encryption and extensive defenses against even highly sophisticated quantum attacks, PQ3 provides protocol protections that...

security.apple.com

They're using Crystal Kyber which is the fastest so there won't be any noticeable difference in encryption and decryption speeds. They're holding off on PQC authentication though. My guess is that they're working on getting it fully hardware accelerated on upcoming chips.

 

[MuzzMelbourne]

Yeah, it will be great, until the power's-that-be mandate client-side tracking, which iOS already has inbuilt, just waiting for activation.

Our parliament(Australian) is already making moves toward's it...

 

[SpiderWeb]

Some things are not clear from the paper though as @MuzzMelbourne has mentioned. If you text someone in a country with restrictive encryption laws, will it fall back to the lowest common denominator? The same if you text someone with an older version of iMessage? That would imply it might still be vulnerable to downgrade attacks.