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Comment by signal11 | Hacker News Reader

What’s the story around e2e encryption on RCS these days? In the past there were a few countries that didn’t allow it, no idea if that has changed.

Also, will iMessage support for RCS include e2ee?

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The current status iirc is that Google built its own e2e solutions in Android Messages, first for one-on-one conversations and as of August 2023 for group chats as well. They released technical papers but I don't think the implementations are part of the official spec. I think this section is basically Apple saying that they are going to push for that standardization:

> Finally, Apple says it will work with the GSMA members on ways to further improve the RCS protocol. This particularly includes improving the security and encryption of RCS messages.

I doubt anything has changed since 2020 in terms of China, Cuba, Iran or Russia but I couldn't find any news one way or the other

The good news is that Google's E2E solution is the Signal protocol:

https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf?sj...

There's a new IETF standard Google has been implementing. It's up to Apple to adopt it.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9420/

> RFC - Proposed Standard (July 2023)

Proposed.

And it's both ridiculous and sad that in 2023 we are going to see a messaging standard without E2EE built into the spec.

Well it was submitted five years ago, that's the speed of standardization sometimes.

TLS and SSH are Proposed Standards also. The next step is Internet Standard. HTTP was promoted to Internet Standard last year.

Apple will be pushing for RCS/Carriers to adopt e2e, but it'll probably just flag green/notify users that messages are not encrypted.

Anything that needs the participation of every carrier on the planet is doomed from the get-go.

As someone who has worked for two carriers Apple, Google etc have little clout.

Governments and their intelligence organisations are what matters.

And countries like UK will be pushing as hard as possible to make E2EE optional.

Basically N/A

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