cross-posted from: https://kbin.projectsegfau.lt/m/tech@kbin.social/t/26889
Google just announced that all RCS conversations in Messages are now fully end-to-end encrypted, even in group chats. RCS stands for Rich Communication Services and is replacing traditional text and picture messaging, providing you with more dynamic and secure features. With RCS enabled, you can share high-res photos and videos, see typing indicators for your…
iMessage is not fully E2E encrypted unless you have advanced data protection turned on. If you don’t, the keys to your conversations still rest on Apple’s servers.
That’s untrue. The keys are generated on your device and Apple doesn’t have those stored. You need apple devices to grant access for another device as Apple doesn’t have your key. There’s other security holes where apple can generate new keys but that doesn’t change the fact that it is actually E2E encrypted.
It’s not open source so no way to really trust it
I don’t think it’s true as long as you don’t make iCloud Backups
This is the correct answer.
No that’s only for iCloud backups of your iMessages.
It’s full E2E encryption even without that turned on. However, just because something is encrypted doesn’t mean it’s secure, as you point out.
Regardless, governments/organizations have gotten very good at finding vulnerabilities and exploiting them before academic and/or private sector security groups discover the same vulnerabilities, who will then go and publish their findings which eventually leads to them getting patched. As a side note: For anyone interested in some modern hacker/cybersecurity history, I recommend reading the book, Sandworm by Andy Greenberg. It’s pretty damn wild what it covers and that’s only a fraction of the modern state of global cyber warfare (and yes, just about the entire world has been engaged in what pretty much amounts to cyber warfare/espionage/sabotage for the last 10-15+ years).