Video conferencing platform Zoom has announced that starting next week, Zoom’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) offering will be available as a technical preview. As part of this it will be proactively soliciting feedback from users for the first 30 days.
Zoom users, both free & paid, can host up to 200 participants in an E2EE meeting on Zoom.
Zoom had announced in May its plans to build an end-to-end-encrypted meeting option into its platform, on top of Zoom’s already strong encryption & advanced security features. So now, it was rolling out Phase 1 of 4 of its E2EE offering, “which provides robust protections to help prevent the interception of decryption keys that could be used to monitor meeting Content.”
About E2EE
Zoom’s E2EE uses the same powerful GCM encryption you get now in a Zoom meeting. The only difference is where those encryption keys live, explained the post.
In typical meetings, Zoom’s Cloud generates encryption keys & distributes them to meeting participants using Zoom apps as they join. With Zoom’s E2EE, the meeting’s host generates encryption keys & uses public key cryptography to distribute these keys to the other meeting participants. Zoom’s servers become oblivious relays & never see the encryption keys required to decrypt the meeting Contents.
“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.”
