Google Messages to Adopt Cross-Platform Security Standard

Google announced that it will adopt the IETF’s Message Layer Security (MLS) standard in its Messages app on Android, a move that could lead to dramatic security and interoperability benefits.

“Most modern consumer messaging platforms (including Google Messages) support end-to-end encryption, but users today are limited to communicating with contacts who use the same platform,” Google’s Giles Hogben explains. “For interoperability to succeed in practice, however, regulations must be combined with open, industry-vetted, standards, particularly in the area of privacy, security, and end-to-end encryption.”

One such standard, MLS, may hold the key to a secure, cross-platform, interoperable future in which competing messaging solutions can seamlessly communicate with each other. As Hogben notes, MLS is practical, scalable, and flexible, and it can even address emerging threats to user privacy and security, including quantum computing.

As such, Google will implement MLS in its Messages app and will help spread its use by open-sourcing its implementation in Android so that others can adopt it more easily as well. There’s no timetable for this work, nor any mention of how or whether it may impact Rich Communication Services (RCS), another mobile standard that Google implements in Messages and has promoted as a cross-platform solution. (To little effect outside of Android.)