After over five years of work by a committed core group, the world now has its first “standardised and fully specified end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protocol” – Messaging Layer Security (MLS) – which anyone can choose to adopt, irrespective of implementation language or cipher suite.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) today published MLS as an official standard, in RFC 9420. Its publication is good news for security and privacy lovers. It is the fruit of extensive efforts to build an open standard that ensures organisations seeking to build or deploy robust E2EE are not locked into proprietary, expensive encryption protocol siloes.
