Announcing Wire MLS General Availability

Wire is the first and only complete enterprise collaboration suite, including messaging, calling, conferencing, and file sharing, that is completely secured by MLS, supporting end-to-end encryption for thousands of communicating group members.

Elevating E2EE to the Enterprise

MLS is the first IETF standard protocol for secure communications, and it was expressly designed to solve the severe scaling limits of prior key management protocols, which are built around pairwise (1:1) key exchanges and, due to computational load, cannot scale beyond 256 group members. MLS solves this problem by introducing a novel, tree-based key exchange technique that dramatically reduces the computational burden of large groups. 

Lack of scalability has been a key obstacle standing in the way of enterprise adoption of E2EE security for digital collaboration. A ceiling of a couple of hundred group members in messaging channels meant that a secure communications platform could serve use cases in which the organization’s overall size was smaller or where security requirements naturally limited group size, such as in classified, governing board, out-of-band, or crisis communications scenarios. 

But for large organizations who wanted to secure their everyday collaboration across both broad and more restricted groups, key exchange scaling limits made that ambition infeasible.

Wire is blowing that barrier away. Our initial General Availability release has been tested to support up to two thousand group members, each with up to eight devices. Subsequent releases will push this number up into the tens and hundreds of thousands. This scale allows large organizations to rely on Wire as their primary enterprise collaboration platform with the highest level of security built in.

Wire MLS-Powered Features

It’s relatively easy to think of group membership and device count per user as the measure of scalability, but with Wire, MLS unlocks powerful capabilities that are out of reach for non-MLS platforms.

One prime example is our approach to federations. The fundamental notion of system federation is simple. It means allowing two or more backend systems to establish intercommunication between their users and devices. But where it gets tricky is when you need to apply sound security principles to that federation. (If you want to know how *not* to do federations securely, read how Microsoft Teams does it.) In the context of secure communications, federation requires granular administrative controls over which users from each system can see, search, request, and establish communication with users and groups of the other systems. Such granular controls require that administrative functionality be able to interact with all groups and users while maintaining the integrity of E2EE of data and signaling for those groups and users. Wire takes advantage of MLS’ scalability to make this real in our federation support. Importantly, the way this shows up is how the user experiences federations in Wire. For example, in federating messaging, each chat can be graded into classifications that clearly show if federated users are present and if users have a distinct clearance for the shared information in that chat. This prevents instances where someone can join and snoop on a channel “accidentally” and degrade confidentiality. Doing this for thousands of users on multiple devices is beyond anything previously possible, making Wire Federation unique in the industry. 

The Need for E2EE Has Never Been Greater

It is no overstatement to say that the threats to organizational data security, privacy, and sovereignty have never been higher. The digital landscape has undergone a tectonic shift in the last few months due to sudden changes in global political, military, and commercial relationships. The U.S. government, with its powerful state surveillance apparatus has abandoned all pretense of cooperation with the EU and other sovereign frameworks for data privacy and security. This new threat emerges against the backdrop of unrelenting espionage from other nation-state actors and ever-growing criminal syndicates that can marshal huge resources to penetrate and compromise organizational cybersecurity. 

In this environment, entrusting the safety of your organization’s core digital workstreams to the care of collaboration suites that don’t automatically enforce the sound and sensible security of E2EE is extremely risky.  You only need to read the news of corporate espionage via messaging channels at Rippling or the compromise and exfiltration of the entire Slack messaging platform at Disney to see what’s at stake.

Always-On MLS is the Only Way to Be Secure

Some collaboration suite vendors engage in security theatre. They advertise support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) or MLS, but require users or administrators to manually opt in, often at the cost of essential features. They know the average users won't dig deeper and will assume their communication are secure by default. Meanwhile, IT and security teams, under pressure to check compliance boxes, often accept these half-measure, especially when there's no personal liability involved. 

So let’s be brutally honest. If a collaboration platform only offers an optional E2EE feature, it might as well not exist. That’s why Wire MLS-enabled E2EE is always on by default, delivering rich collaboration capabilities and the industry’s most robust security that is delightfully invisible to users.

Choose Your Path to Enterprise-Scale Secure Collaboration

MLS will be generally available on April,24 2025. As of the GA of MLS, all Wire Cloud users and teams will be enabled for MLS. Learn more about our MLS support by reading our MLS white paper. If you’re ready to get your organization on the Wire platform, request a demo. Or if simply want to get started using Wire MLS security, sign up for Wire today.