iMessage and FaceTime are end-to-end encrypted

[…] conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data.

Interesting to hear this from the horse’s mouth. iMessage and FaceTime have long been suspected to work this way, but as far as I know, this is the first time Apple itself has confirmed this.

Of course, the fact that we needed Apple to inform us of this precludes it from being useful to people who have a serious need for this kind of security–they must be able to directly observe for themselves that it works that way.

However, that doesn’t diminish the benefits to users who don’t know or care about encryption–those people are (if the quoted statement is accurate) protected from eavesdropping, whether they know it or not–and that makes it worth doing. This includes both innocent people who might be wrongly monitored, as well as criminals who will be that much harder to convict. But that is the price of living in a free society: everyone has privacy, or no-one does. There is no middle ground.

I would love to know more technical details about how this is accomplished.