Zoom now supports end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) calls

The Video conferencing platform Zoom announced the implementation of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) and its availability starting next week.

The popular Video conferencing platform Zoom announced the availability of the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) starting next week. The new E2EE feature will be made available for both paid and free accounts.

“We’re excited to announce that starting next week, Zoom’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) offering will be available as a technical preview, which means we’re proactively soliciting feedback from users for the first 30 days.” reads the post published by the company. “Zoom users – free and paid – around the world can host up to 200 participants in an E2EE meeting on Zoom, providing increased privacy and security for your sessions.”

With E2EE, users will be able to generate individual encryption keys and use them to protect voice or video calls with encryption protecting them from eavesdropping. The users use public key cryptography to distribute the keys to the other meeting participants. 

The software will locally store the key and will not share it with company servers. This design choice aims at ensuring that Zoom itself is not able to eavesdrop on communications.

Users that want to protect their communications with the E2EE have to update their clients and enable support for E2EE calls from their account.

When E2EE is enable a green shield is displayed on the top-left corner of the screen.

“End-to-end encryption is another stride toward making Zoom the most secure communications platform in the world,” said Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan. “This phase of our E2EE offering provides the same security as existing end-to-end-encrypted messaging platforms, but with the video quality and scale that has made Zoom the communications solution of choice for hundreds of millions of people and the world’s largest enterprises.”

The company announced that it plans to roll out enhanced identity management and E2EE SSO integration as part of Phase 2, scheduled for 2021. 

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Zoom)

---