The GSM Association, the governing body that oversees the development of the Rich Communications Services (RCS) protocol, said on Tuesday it is working to implement end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to secure messages sent between the Android and iOS ecosystems.
“The next important milestone is the addition of a universal RCS profile to important user protections such as compatible end-to-end encryption,” Tom Van Pelt, CTO, GSMA said.
“This will be the first deployment of a standardized, interoperable message encryption between different computing platforms that solves significant technical challenges such as key federation and group membership using cryptography.”
Development takes place the day after Apple iOS 18 is officially out with RCS support in its Messages app, which comes with advanced features like message reactions, input prompts, read receipts, and high-quality multimedia sharing, among others.
RCS, which is an improvement over the current SMS standard, does not currently have end-to-end encryption out of the box, which forced Google to implement the Signal protocol to secure RCS conversations on Android.
Earlier this year Apple said it will work with GSMA members to integrate encryption. It should be noted that the company’s proprietary iMessage service supports E2EE.
“We look forward to further collaboration in the mobile ecosystem to advance the RCS standard with compatible end-to-end encryption to keep all RCS messages private and secure,” Van Pelt said.
Google also last July revealed plans to include the Message Layer Security (MLS) protocol in its Messages app for Android to facilitate interoperability between messaging services and platforms.
Back this month, Meta detailed its approach to enable interaction with third-party messaging services WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger as part of efforts to comply with the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA), maintaining E2EE guarantees “as far as possible”.
“Creating third-party chats is technically challenging, and maintaining privacy and security is a shared responsibility.” – Social Media Company said. “We’ve already come a long way, but there’s still a lot to build.”
