The big tech news last month was the FBI’s alert to iPhone and Android users to stop texting after Chinese hackers attacked U.S. networks. Sending SMS messages is a blanket no—it’s woefully insecure. But the more surprising warning was the security hole in RCS, which Apple has just adopted on iPhone and which has become the standard on Android. The question for all those iPhone and Android users is when can they start texting again. A new leak suggests this might be coming soon.
The challenge exposed through the FBI warns the lack of end -to -end encryption in the main generation of RCS. Google has resolved this challenge by packing complete encryption around the RCS messages sent among Google messages. But send a message to an RCS user in some other application or an iPhone, and this encryption falls. Apple has the same challenge. Imessage encryption only works among Apple users, outside the closed apple garden, it also falls.
This challenge was clear, the FBI and the US cyber defense agency. UU. They issued their caution to cell phone users to avoid text messages and use messages and calls from extreme to extreme “whenever possible. ” He stood out when Apple launched its RCS deployment with iOS. 18 The past fall. Google and GSMA, the setter of cellular criteria, were quick to announce end -to -end encryption to RCS, a more detailed update is still months away.
Now a new leak per Android Authority’s investigation into pre-release code suggests that “the latest Google Messages beta supports MLS encryption, RCS’s next step toward E2EE interoperability across apps and platforms.” The team says “we managed to enable MLS for one-on-one RCS conversations in Google Messages, but we haven’t been able to enable it for RCS group chats yet. This indicates that MLS encryption support could be on the horizon for Google Messages.”
I’ve already advised that a much easier solution would be for Google and Apple to collaborate on a fully encrypted bridge between iMessage messages and Google, however, lately it’s not on cards. Instead, the popular RCS protocol; it will have to be improved. And these paintings will basically belong to Google as the main engine of the expansion of RCS. So far, Apple has looked very cool on the platform and seems to be contained in its counter-choric adoption.
MLS or the safety of the messaging layer is an initiative admitted through the IETF that aims They cannot be online at the same time.
Android Authority says that “‘Zinnia’ is the code call for MLS encryption that Google uses in Google messages”, and the play with the parameter flags “We can turn on MLS encryption”, and it’s appealing to note that “we can resort to MLS encryption only for head-to-face conversation flags”, despite his organization Cat Orig.
The GSMA’s most recent update on full encryption to get to RCS advised that we still had months to wait until we even get a timeline on this development. And as I’ve warned in the past, it’s probably coming to Google Messages in Beta for an era before any wider release. Then, you’ll have to work your way up on iPhones, which will take longer unless there’s much more substantive activity caused by FBI caution than we think. In the absence, it would seem that it is an iOS 19 update as soon as possible. Although it is only a hypothesis, there is no formal update.
In the meantime, for Android and iPhone users who would rather send RCS texts from their stock messengers than adopt an over-the-top platform such as Signal or WhatsApp as the U.S. government advises, this will be welcome news.
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