Discord Launches Encrypted Voice and Video Calls

Discord, one among the biggest group chat apps on this planet, announced Tuesday that audio and video calls on the platform will now be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), meaning even Discord won’t know what users in those calls are talking about.

Over the past 10 years, end-to-end encrypted chat has gone from a rare exception—think Skype within the mid-2000s—to the technology behind the world’s hottest chat apps, including iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook Messenger. Discord began as a group-chat platform for gamers, with a deal with audio calls for users playing online games together, but it surely’s also change into popular with individuals who simply desire a place where large numbers of individuals can interact with one another.

The disagreement that claims to have 200 million monthly usersannounced last yr that it’s working to bring end-to-end encryption to its platform, starting with audio and video calls, saying that “at any given moment” thousands and thousands of persons are talking on Discord calls. Now, the corporate is rolling out the technology.

“Today we’ll begin migrating voice and video in direct messages, group direct messages, voice channels, and Go Live streams to use E2EE. You’ll be able to confirm when calls are end-to-end encrypted and perform verification of other members on those calls,” Stephen Birarda, Discord Audio/Video Infrastructure Software Engineer, he wrote in a blog post announcing the implementation and explaining the technical details of the technology being implemented by Discord.

Birarda stated, nevertheless, that personal messages won’t be end-to-end encrypted.

“Security is closely tied to our product and policies. While audio and video will be end-to-end encrypted, Discord messages will continue to adhere to our content moderation approach and will not be end-to-end encrypted,” Birarda wrote.

Discord spokesperson Kellyn Slone told TechCrunch that the corporate has “no current plans” to implement encryption in other areas, equivalent to direct messages or group chats.

Birarda announced that the corporate she is releasing, paper concerning the encryption protocol, which he says has been reviewed by cybersecurity consulting firm Trail of Bits, and open source code.