One Protocol to Rule Them All? On Securing Interoperable Messaging (Transcript of Discussion)

Abstract

I’m a little skeptical that a company like Apple or Meta, WhatsApp, whoever would actually do any of this. And here’s my thinking. So if I’m Tim Cook or whoever’s making decisions at Apple right now, I’m going to say, okay, so they want interoperability. I’ll give them something: I’ll give them RCS, I’ll give them Signal, I’ll give them some lovely protocol that we have that no one really wants to use and it’s hard to work with. I would come up with an API and say, call this, send some key material, we will do some form of public geek cryptography or other and then if you can get your messages into this queue, sure we’ll display it in the WhatsApp client but instead of green, it’ll be an ugly shade of yellow and it’s going to have a big warning message at the top saying we don’t want you to use this.