A Formal Analysis of Apple's iMessage PQ3 Protocol

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Presented at USENIX Security 2025 by

We present the formal verification of Apple's iMessage PQ3, a highly performant, device-to-device messaging protocol offering strong security guarantees even against an adversary with quantum computing capabilities. PQ3 leverages Apple's identity services together with a custom, post-quantum secure initialization phase and afterwards it employs a double ratchet construction in the style of Signal, extended to provide post-quantum, post-compromise security.