The Zoom Video Call Service has announced a solution to a problem that has recently plagued the company: Full End-to-End (E2EE) encryption on the video communications platform, which now serves hundreds of millions of participants a day – with the solution being offered to all zoom users, whether paying users or For the “free” users.
“Since we revealed to the public the draft end-to-end coding design, we have held countless meetings and heard the positions of private rights organizations, crypto experts, our CISO board, government officials, our users and many others, to hear what they think, And while exploring some new technologies that will allow us to offer E2EE to all types of users, “said Eric Yuen , CEO of Zoom.
“We have now uploaded to GitHub the updated E2EE design. We have identified a path that balances the legitimate right of all users to privacy and the safety of users of our platform. The new solution will allow us to offer E2EE as an add-on to all our users around the world – for free and pay – while retaining the ability to prevent and combat criminal phenomena on our platform. “
According to Yuan, to allow this, the free users / base users who want access to E2EE will participate in a one-time process asking the user for more information, such as verifying a phone number via text message. Today, many leading companies are taking similar steps in creating accounts to reduce the mass creation of abusive accounts. “We are confident that by implementing risk-based authentication, combined with our current tools – including a user reporting function – we can continue to prevent platform negative usage.”
The company plans to launch the early E2EE beta in July 2020. All zoom users will continue to use AES 256 GCM encryption as the default encryption, one of the most powerful encryption facilities available today.
E2EE will be an optional feature in zoom, as it limits the functionality of certain appointments, such as the ability to manage appointments using traditional PSTN telephone lines, or SIP / H.323 conference room systems. Hosts will turn E2EE on or off based on each session.