Apple’s iMessage gains industry-leading quantum security
Apple is preparing for future threats to iMessage by introducing upgraded encryption for its messaging service by using quantum computers.
Think of it as state-of-the-art quantum security for messaging at scale, the company says, resulting in Apple’s messaging system being more secure against both current and future foes.
What is the protection?
Announced on Apple’s Security Research blog, the new iMessage protection is called PQ3 and promises the “strongest security properties of any at-scale messaging protocol in the world.”
The rationale behind this protection is “What if?”
In this case, Apple’s security teams asked themselves what might happen if hackers, criminals, or state-backed rogue surveillance firms gathered vast quantities of encrypted iMessage data today in order to break that encryption using quantum computers tomorrow.
Apple calls this a Harvest Now, Decrypt Later attack. The new security protocol is designed to help protect against this.
How likely are such attacks?
These attacks are less likely today than they might become. It is widely accepted that quantum computers will be capable of cracking the classical public key cryptography such as RSA, Elliptic Curve signatures, and Diffie-Hellman key exchange in use today.
Apple explains:
“All these algorithms are based on difficult mathematical problems that have long been considered too computationally intensive for computers to solve, even when accounting for Moore’s law. However, the rise of quantum computing threatens to change the equation. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could solve these classical mathematical problems in fundamentally different ways, and therefore — in theory — do so fast enough to threaten the security of end-to-end encrypted communications.”
In truth, quantum computers are expensive, which means their use is largely limited to only the world’s most powerful entities. But as more are made and costs decline, they will proliferate — and if Apple is considering the potential threat, then threat actors of various stripes will also be exploring the possibility.
The security industry is getting ready
Apple isn’t alone. The cryptographic…
