The GSMA Association (GSMA) has officially announced support for End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) to secure messages sent over the Rich Communications Services (RCS) protocol, bringing much-needed protection to cross-platform messages exchanged between Android and iOS platforms.
To this end, the new GSMA specifications for RCS include E2EE based on the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol via what is known as RCS Universal Profile 3.0.
“The new specifications define how MLS can be applied in the context of RCS”, said Tom Van Pelt, GSMA CTO. “These procedures ensure that messages and other content, such as files, remain private and secure when in transit between clients”.
This also means that RCS will be the first
“large-scale messaging service” to support E2EE interoperability across different client implementations from different providers in the near future.
It’s worth noting that Google’s own RCS implementation, used in the Messages app for Android, secures conversations using the Signal protocol to address the lack of built-in E2EE protections. However, the encryption protection currently only applies to messages exchanged through the app, and not to messages exchanged between Messages users on iOS or users of other RCS clients on Android.
