Messaging Layer Security (MLS), is a security layer for end-to-end encrypting messages in arbitrarily sized groups. It is being built by the

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

MLS working group and designed to be efficient, practical and secure.

Security properties

Security properties of MLS include message confidentiality, message integrity and authentication, membership authentication, asynchronicity, forward secrecy, post-compromise security, and scalability.

History

The idea was born in 2016 and first discussed in an unofficial meeting during IETF 96 in Berlin with attendees from

Wire Overhead power cabling. The conductor consists of seven strands of steel (centre, high tensile strength), surrounded by four outer layers of aluminium (high conductivity). Sample diameter 40 mm A wire is a flexible strand of metal. Wire is c ...

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, w ...

and

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

. Initial ideas were based on pairwise encryption for secure 1:1 and group communication. In 2017, an academic paper introducing Asynchronous Ratcheting Trees was published by University of Oxford setting the focus on more efficient encryption schemes. The first BoF took place in February 2018 at IETF 101 in London. The founding members are

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

, and

INRIA The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name ''Institut de recherche en informatiq ...

Implementations

OpenMLS
language: Rust, license: MIT
MLS++
language: C++, license: BSD-2

References

Cryptography Internet privacy Secure communication {{crypto-stub