Wire has upgraded the standard messaging protocol from Proteus to the new Wire Messaging Layer Security (MLS).
MLS is the first global open standard for end-to-end encrypted communications.
Background
Industry peers and academic institutions developed it together. Wire was an initiator of MLS in 2016 and has been a key contributor ever since. Employees from companies such as Mozilla, Cisco, Google, Cloudflare, Amazon, and Meta, and research organizations such as INRIA, Oxford University, The US Naval Postgraduate School, and ETH Zurich have made contributions to the protocol.
MLS is inspired by the success of encrypting the communication between people and websites, and other web services using Transport Layer Security (TLS), a crucial security component of today’s Internet. MLS adds end-to-end encryption to messaging applications by providing a standardized and open framework.
Benefits for you
MLS offers you many security and usability benefits.
- Thanks to a new method for deriving cryptographic keys, MLS brings performance benefits to communication within large groups. You'll notice it, particularly in audio and video conferences.
- The new security architecture also ensures at the technical level that only authorized participants in a group conversation can decrypt the group messages on their devices. This architecture enables Wire to bring the only end-to-end encrypted features in the market, like channels and file management.
- In addition, Wire created the basis for interoperability, a compliance requirement by the European Commission's Digital Markets Act, increased.
Learn more in our blog article and watch this video to understand MLS better.
Find information about the protocol change