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The tech giant claims that the PQ3 security protocol provides ‘protections that surpass those in all other widely deployed messaging apps’.
Apple has revealed its new security upgrade for iMessage, which the company claims will defend against future quantum computing cyberattacks.
According to the tech giant, the new “post-quantum” cryptographic security protocol for iMessage, called PQ3, is designed to withstand and protect against security attacks from highly sophisticated quantum computers – the likes of which have yet to be introduced.
As quantum computing continues to grow in capabilities and sophistication, many believe that the powerful tech could be used by threat actors to exploit and attack security and encryption software in the future.
In its announcement, Apple outlined how current messaging platforms primarily employ “classical” public key cryptography to secure end-to-end encryption between devices, consisting of algorithms based on difficult mathematical problems considered too “computationally intensive” for computers to solve.
“However, the rise of quantum computing threatens to change the equation,” the company’s security engineering and architecture team. “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.”
While cyberattackers may be unable to decrypt this data today due to current tech restrictions, it is believed that many bad actors are practising a ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ strategy, which involves the collection and storage of encrypted data with the intent of using future technological breakthroughs (such as in quantum tech) to decrypt it.
According to Apple, the PQ3 protocol uses and builds upon existing end-to-end encryption capabilities while also using “post-quantum cryptography” to both secure and “automatically restore” the cryptographic security of a conversation, even in the event of the security being compromised.
The company claimed that, to verify the capabilities of the new protocol, “extensive” reviews were conducted from its own security teams as well as from external experts in cryptography. Apple also said that PQ3 support will roll out with the public releases of iOS 17.4, iPadOS 17.4, macOS 14.4 and watchOS 10.4.
The reveal of PQ3 comes at a time when end-to-end encryption is a hot topic in mainstream tech conversations, as last week the European Court of Human Rights ruled that instances of law enforcement requiring companies to create “backdoors” to the privacy-focused technology violate human rights.
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