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from the all-your-keybase-are-belong-to-us dept.
Zoom Acquires Keybase to Bring End-to-End Encryption to Video Platform:
Popular communications platform provider Zoom Video announced on Thursday that it has acquired secure messaging and file-sharing service Keybase for an undisclosed sum. The move is the latest by the company as it attempts to bolster the security of its offerings and build in end-to-end encryption that can scale to the company's massive user base.
"There are en-to-end encrypted communications platforms. There are communications platforms with easily deployable security. There are enterprise-scale communications platforms. We believe that no current platform offers all of these. This is what Zoom plans to build, giving our users security, ease of use, and scale, all at once," Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, said in a statement.
Zoom said it would offer an end-to-end encrypted meeting mode to all paid accounts.
[...] "This acquisition marks a key step for Zoom as we attempt to accomplish the creation of a truly private video communications platform that can scale to hundreds of millions of participants, while also having the flexibility to support Zoom's wide variety of uses," Yuan wrote in a blog post. "Our goal is to provide the most privacy possible for every use case, while also balancing the needs of our users and our commitment to preventing harmful behavior on our platform. Keybase's experienced team will be a critical part of this mission."
Details on Zoom's encryption roadmap are available on the Zoom blog.
Previously:
(2020-04-21) This Open-Source Program Deepfakes You During Zoom Meetings, in Real Time
(2020-04-20) Every Security Issue Uncovered so far in the Zoom Video Chat App
(2020-04-17) Looking for Alternative, Self-Hosted Audio (or Video) Chat Services
(2020-04-15) Over 500,000 Zoom Accounts Sold on Hacker Forums, the Dark Web
(2020-04-13) Zoom Admits Data Got Routed Through China
Also at TechCrunch and The Verge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2020, @01:12PM (1 child)
Quite a while ago i played with an e-mail encryption add-on whose name I no longer remember but I believe it used PGP. Anyhow, as I recall the technique for writing to several recipients was fairly straight-forward. A very big random encryption key was created and then used with an extremely fast *symmetric* encryption algorithm. The random key was then encrypted with the public key of each recipient. And the entire mess was then transmitted as the message to each recipient. Thus each recipient could decrypt the random key and use it to decrypt the actual message. In any case, this is how I would do it if I were Zuckerberg.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2020, @03:38AM
I was going to reply to my comment, but I'll respond to yours so you can see it too.
There is already an RFC [ietf.org] for this. Interestingly, it was also written by Zimmermann, who was key to the invention of PGP. While a little out of date in the security department, the baseline is very solid. It also isn't a lot of work to extend that to support multiple users or broadcast situations with the same key.