Messaging apps are preparing for this threat of the future

MADRID (Portaltic/EP) – Messaging services have already begun to prepare for a future that has not yet arrived but which raises new concerns in terms of cybersecurity: quantum computing and its ability to break the encryption that keeps users’ communications private.

Apple announced in February that it would protect its iMessage service with the PQ3 post-quantum cryptography protocol, with the aim of improving protection and resilience against sophisticated quantum attacks. In September last year, Signal took the lead by announcing the integration into the encryption protocol of the specification it calls ‘PQXDH’ (or ‘Post-Quantum Extended Diffie-Hellman’), an additional layer of security designed for the era of quantum computing.

They are not the only companies that have begun to prepare for a future threat; Google also announced last year its intention to incorporate the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specification RFC 9420 MLS into Messages as part of its work to advance the interoperability of messaging applications, which also allows it to address security and privacy problems arising from quantum computing.

Since March, Tuta has been protecting newly created accounts on its email service with the quantum-safe hybrid encryption protocol TutaCrypt.

In this way, they seek to anticipate the era of quantum computing, in which technology firms such as Fujitsu, IBM and Alhambra IT are working, which operates under the principles of quantum physics and applies them to calculations to solve problems much faster compared to current processing capacity.

The main concern for companies developing messaging applications is the ability of quantum computing to break the encryption that currently protects users’ communications.

“A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could solve these classical math problems in fundamentally different ways and thus, in theory, do so fast enough to threaten the security of end-to-end encrypted communications,” Apple said at the time.

To avoid this, they resort to post-quantum cryptography, which applies techniques that use complex mathematical problems that are difficult to solve even for quantum computers.

It’s a response to a type of attack called ‘harvest now, decrypt later’, in which cyber attackers appear to have begun collecting and storing data that they cannot decrypt today but will be able to in the future.