Zoom’s New Update: End-to-End Encryption

Zoom, the video conference platform, announced to end-to-end encryption this year, and at present, the company is arranging a comprehensive test. It is said that Zoom users – free or paid – can host up to 200 participants in an E2EE meeting on Zoom.

Zoom stressed, in typical meetings, Zoom’s cloud generates encryption keys and distributes them to meeting participants using Zoom apps as they join. With Zoom’s E2EE, the meeting’s host generates encryption keys and uses public key cryptography to distribute these keys to the other meeting participants. Zoom’s sever become oblivious relays and never see the encryption keys required to decrypt the meeting contents.

Zoom has announced a series of measures to strengthen its security, including E2EE, which was previously exposed by the media that it could not really achieve its target. At first, E2EE was only available for paid users, while Zoom changes its word that both free and paid are available right now. And its testing has already started in July.

End-to-end encryption limits the contents of video conference to the senders and recipients, avoiding hacking by operators, web service suppliers, or even the video meeting platform itself. At present, the technology has been applied by more and more instant message companies like Signal, Telegram, Apple iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, LINE, etc.