Ramy Raoof’s Post

View profile for Ramy Raoof, graphic

Cairo, North Africa . FOSS Technologist, Privacy & Holistic Security. Working at the intersection of human rights, technology & internet infrastructure

For many years, it was thought to be black magic to bring the best of Signal, Matrix and Wire protocols into one new protocol - now we have a working proof standard protocol - OpenMLS. This is a big step towards more privacy, and more encryption: this week the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol was published as a new internet-standard. Just to give you an indication of adoptions: MLS got endorsements from Cisco, AWS and Cloudfare, and just one day after its release Google announced its plans to integrate MLS into Android codebase - this is huge step. All of this means more encryption, to more people, and privacy impact on massive scale. Similarly to the impact of integrating signal-protocol to major messaging apps like Whatsapp. Prior to MLS, we didn't have a comprehensive specification of a protocol for end-to-end encryption informed by academia and industry-wide input. Protocols like the Off-the-Record, Wickr, Signal, paved the way with modern security properties and asynchronous messaging capabilities. Every new protocol introduced things that prior protocols couldn't or simply addressed different priorities. For example the Signal protocol introduced the asynchronous mode of operation the Off-the-Record protocol was lacking and Signal has made end-to-end encryption available to mobile messaging. It has since become the reference for practical and high-quality end-to-end encryption. Generally, existing protocols were typically focused on end-to-end encryption between two peers. Using them to protect group chats with many peers proved difficult and in addition to existing and emerging threats meant compromising on security properties or accepting high computational and bandwidth costs. All of these developments gave birth to MLS. Over the coming two years or so this protocol will continue to mature and give birth to a new ecosystem of libraries, communication apps, tools built on top of it. If you would like to learn more i encourage you to read this blogpost https://lnkd.in/eQVUEcRn and keep eye on its progress, and huge thanks to many people and teams including Raphael Robert, Julian Mair.

  • No alternative text description for this image

To view or add a comment, sign in

Explore topics