22 ms·

Zoom meetings aren’t end-to-end encrypted, despite marketing

1230 points by tony101 7y ago

dkdk8283 7y ago
Zoom has received a fair bit of critical feedback lately. Has anyone given other platforms such as Vidyo identical levels of scrutiny?
- ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
  TBF it's mostly short sellers doing this, because the complaints have been... poor. The first one was about an advertisement pixel, which everybody is doing but for some reason surfaced only for Zoom. The second one is end-to-end encryption, which is not expected at all for VC apps. NOBODY does it!
  - fsh 7y ago
    I really hope that this stupid "short seller conspiracy" meme is going away soon. According to the article Apple does end-to-end encryption for video conferences. Also other providers are not lying about it like zoom does.
    - ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
      Apple has a VC product? I wasn't aware of this
      - fsh 7y ago
        FaceTime can do group chats since 2018.
  - honesttoss 7y ago
    >NOBODY does it! Irrelevant. That as nothing to due with the fact that they say they are. Zoom is being completely dishonest, and as some other commented here, some orgs like in health care area, have E2E encryption as requirement, Zoom says they have, but don't. It's literally fraud.
    - gtirloni 7y ago
      Where does it say they have e2e video encryption? I can only find something about chats.
      - mabcat 7y ago
        https://zoom.us/healthcare https://zoom.us/healthcare "Achieve HIPAA (signed BAA) and PIPEDA/PHIPA compliance with complete end-to-end 256-bit AES encryption."
        drjesusphd 7y ago
        What if one pays $200/mo for the HIPAA-compliant plans?
        ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
        1. HIPAA et al have very specific meaning that do not have anything to do with end-to-end encryption at all. If you know this, read this line, and care about HIPAA you know exactly this. 2. end-to-end has several meanings, for users it means what Signal does, for machines it means TLS is securing edges.
  - phonon 7y ago
    > NOBODY does it! Google Duo does. https://support.google.com/duo/answer/9280240?hl=en https://support.google.com/duo/answer/9280240?hl=en
    - ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
      It is not a VC application, it's a user chat application
      - phonon 7y ago
        You can have a group call with up to 12 people now. https://www.neowin.net/news/google-duo-now-supports-up-to-12-people-in-a-group-video-call/ https://www.neowin.net/news/google-duo-now-supports-up-to-12...
- vmednis 7y ago
  I'm usually not the one for conspiracy theories and this is most likely just media outlets fixating on one topic for clicks, but sometimes this just feels like a smear campaign against Zoom. I'm sure a lot of these issues could be found for other providers as well.
  - Flimm 7y ago
    Name one provider that claims to provide end-to-end encrypted video calls but doesn't.
    - vmednis 7y ago
      GoToMeeting claims end to end encryption[1] and in the same sentence say it's just SSL just like Zoom. Never the less they offer call-in as well so end to end becomes impossible right there. I have serious doubts about any conference software offering real end to end encryption as it's unrealistic for clients to be dealing with that many av streams. 1. https://support.goto.com/meeting/help/security-faqs-g2m050014 https://support.goto.com/meeting/help/security-faqs-g2m05001...
      - comex 7y ago
        End-to-end encryption doesn't require participants to receive full-quality video from everyone. Each client can be responsible for encoding their own video feed at multiple quality levels simultaneously – what WebRTC calls simulcasting. That does increase required processing power and upload bandwidth, but not to the point of infeasibility. And you do inevitably leak the identity of the person currently talking, as the server has to know whether to relay the high- or low-quality video stream for each participant to each other participant, and it can trivially tell the difference between the two based on bitrate. But that's much less bad than leaking the whole video stream.
        xenonite 7y ago
        To add on this, an encrypted stream with a variable bitrate encoding allows to guess the amount of transmitted information entropy.
sieabahlpark 7y ago
Considering you can call into it with a phone. Duh? Unless you explicitly disable calling in with a phone you can't really ensure E2E encryption.
Flimm 7y ago
This is not "slightly" dishonest on Zoom's part. It is dishonest. Edit: now that the title has been modified, I feel I need to add back context. Zoom claims to support end-to-end encryption when it doesn't. That is dishonest.
- tyingq 7y ago
  "Zoom for the Enterprise Secure and reliable End-to-end 256-bit AES encryption, data sovereignty, and role-based access control" Right on the front page. So, it would seem dishonest, yes.
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    There's the technical definition of "end-to-end" that we all know here—encrypted at one endpoint and decrypted at the other—but I'm wondering how well-understood that term is in broader context. I could see someone saying "end-to-end" encrypted meaning that each segment in the path is encrypted, but with the intermediate nodes decrypting and re-encrypting the payload. Perhaps we should try to come up with a more specific term? Or we should at least be aware of the potential for confusion. Not excusing Zoom here—they should know better.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      "End to end encryption" is the more specific term! The specific term for each segment being encrypted is "link encryption". The general term is plain "encryption".
    - unityByFreedom 7y ago
      end-to-end isn't some marketing phrase like "the cloud", it has a technical meaning. They flat out lied
    - pulse7 7y ago
      It seems that HN is flooded with commenters trying to redefine the well-established meaning of strong E2E encryption. I ask myself if there is any motivation for such comments?
timkam 7y ago
I guess Zoom says they're end-to-end encrypted because they're using WebRTC, which probably means traffic is end-to-end encrypted after signaling, but users need to trust that zoom's signaling server doesn't do anything fishy. Edit: I do not understand the reason for the downvotes. I am not defending the practice but am just describing their potential line of explanation. Please let me know explicitly if my comment is technically incorrect. Also, I would be interested what other vendors claim, who probably use similar technology under the hood.
- fsh 7y ago
  Video conferences via WebRTC usually have a central server that distributes all the video streams and are therefore not end-to-end encrypted.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    End to End encryption in conferences of >2 participants causes substantial quality degradation for the same bandwidth use, since you can't have a central server re encoding streams to produce low quality streams for those participants who need it. I believe zooms reputation as being more likely to 'just work' in part hinges on that,
    - shuckles 7y ago
      That's a fair technical tradeoff, but you can't have it both ways.
    - anticensor 7y ago
      If end-to-end symmetrical is not feasible then use fully homomorphic public key encryption, which will allow operations without decryption.
      - londons_explore 7y ago
        Show me any system allowing video re-encoding with this...
mabcat 7y ago
End-to-end encryption has been named as a required feature for telehealth in Australia. Interest in telehealth has gone from zero to infinity over the past two weeks for obvious reasons. So I've been trying really hard to work out if Zoom is E2E, and reached the same conclusions as the article. First, it isn't, and second, Zoom are really going out of their way to obscure that fact. It's great that The Intercept is taking a look at this, because it's absolutely beyond the capabilities of healthcare practitioners and the professional bodies to get to the bottom of. There's a ridiculous amount of confusion here, compounded by "you need to get the HIPAA version because HIPAA means privacy".
- PudgePacket 7y ago
  Hopefully we've reconsidered the laws of mathematics in the last few years ... https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathematics-dont-apply-here-says-australian-pm/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema... "“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” said Turnbull. Turnbull’s comments came as he proposed a new law to force tech companies to give security services access to encrypted messages." "The UK home secretary Amber Rudd has previously called encryption “completely unacceptable” and the UK prime minister Theresa May has said that the big internet companies give terrorists “safe spaces” to communicate." Going to have to get over this first :/
  - ignoramous 7y ago
    > The UK home secretary Amber Rudd has previously called encryption "completely unacceptable" ... Theresa May has said that the big internet companies give terrorists "safe spaces" to communicate. Ironically, the UK government in fact uses Zoom for all its meetings depsite privacy and security implications. Saudi Arabia, take note. Ref: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-boris-johnson-zoom-private-government-meeting-2020-3?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-boris-johnson-zo...
    - ragebol 7y ago
      So with the right URL, you can tell them yourself!
devin 7y ago
It's disappointing to see a company that has better tech than its rivals playing these games. I have been singing Zoom's praises, but this really makes me want to look elsewhere. What a bummer.
- mulmen 7y ago
  Zoom has always been shady as hell. Between the ridiculous web server on MacOS, web client anti-patterns and other endless nonsense the only explanation for their popularity is good marketing.
  - AlphaSite 7y ago
    I dont know, their competitors are probably the reason for their popularity. It’s definitely a space with a lack of genuinely UX focused competitors.
    - mulmen 7y ago
      Sure but that’s kind of like saying Wells Fargo has competitive interest rates. The advertised product isn’t the problem. It’s everything they make you take along with it.
  - netflixandkill 7y ago
    The explanation for their popularity is that it isn't a constant struggle to use zoom for meetings. Their software may have other problems, but people can run it and get into a meeting with minimal effort. Yesterday by comparison half the people on a Skype meeting had to dial into an audio bridge with their cell phones because their computer audio didn't work for no fucking reason, and screen sharing kept lagging unless restarted every so often. The good marketing for zoom is that webex is awful.
    - Loughla 7y ago
      >The good marketing for zoom is that webex is awful. 100% this. We switched to zoom as stay home orders came out. And only because it worked 100% every time, with little to no fiddling. The non-tech literate employees at my place are patting themselves on the back for being able to set up and host a zoom meeting. Because it's one button. And that's why they're used so much. They are the literal definition of it just works. People aren't worried about anything else right now.
narsil 7y ago
I am willing to chalk this up to an honest mistake considering "end-to-end" encryption as being from the client's end to the server, although that's not the accepted use of the term. This appears to be their explanation. I hope their marketing team fixes this now that it's been pointed out to them though.
- mulmen 7y ago
  That’s not an honest mistake. It’s an inexcusable fuckup. End to end encryption is not a difficult concept. Redefining the “ends” doesn’t excuse Zoom’s continually shady behavior.
- thesimon 7y ago
  I am willing to chalk this up to an honest mistake considering "encryption" as being compression, although that's not the accepted use of the term. This appears to be their explanation. I hope their marketing team fixes this now that it's been pointed out to them though.
- t0mas88 7y ago
  A single honest mistake in the privacy/security area is already close to inexcusable. Zoom has a proven terrible track record in anything security and privacy related. So letting this one go would be very very naive.
- albedoa 7y ago
  Since this comment was written, narsil (Vinod Chandruis) has edited his profile to remove the fact that he is a co-founder of Kloudless. You can see it cached in google search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=narsil+kloudless https://www.google.com/search?q=narsil+kloudless Kloudless is currently promoting security solutions on their twitter timeline.
- albedoa 7y ago
  Since this comment was written, narsil (Vinod Chandruis) has edited his profile to remove the fact that he is a co-founder of Kloudless. You can see it cached in google search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=narsil+kloudless https://www.google.com/search?q=narsil+kloudless Kloudless is currently promoting security solutions on their twitter timeline.
catmanjan 7y ago
Does anyone know of a video conferencing system (3++++ participants) that actually does do end-to-end encryption?
- ekimekim 7y ago
  It looks like WebRTC doesn't support it, so basically no-one can because all these browser-based technologies end up just being WebRTC in the end. From the Jitsi Meet README: > WebRTC does not (yet) provide a way of conducting multi-party conversations with end-to-end encryption. Unless you consistently compare DTLS fingerprints with your peers vocally, the same goes for one-to-one calls.
  - nschoe 7y ago
    I don't understand "WebRTC doesn't support it". What do you mean? WebRTC uses an external signalling channel to negotiate ICE candidates, codecs, and necessary information to establish a media communication. Once this is done, the visio/audio conference is P2P and encrypted from the caller to the callee: how is this not E2E? (Genuinely curious, not criticizing) That is, if you're not using a TURN relay server, which is easy enough to know. Maybe you meant that multi-party (one-to-many or many-to-many) calls are not E2E. Again I'm not too sure I understand: it is possible to have multi-party conf calls: each participants can encrypt its media stream and send it to the N-1 other participants. Obviously this costs a lot of CPU (for multiple encryption) and a lot of uplink because the same stream is sent N-1 times. But it is __possible__, and certainly viable with only 3 or 4 participants, provided people have a decent connection (WebRTC uses adapative bitrate streaming [0] to compensate for bandwith usage). Then again, I know that generally, with WebRTC people would use MCU [1] when dealing with many-to-many conf calls, and then I agree it breaks E2E. But for the other mentioned cases, WebRTC is E2E, isn't it? Again, I'm genuinely curious about this, not trying to criticize or undermine. Thank! [0]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming [1]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Multipoint_control_unit https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Multipoint_control_unit
    - Kalium 7y ago
0x006A 7y ago
how can you have end-to-end encryption with server side processing in conference calls with 50 participants?
- ekimekim 7y ago
  You abandon the server-side processing part and have all 50 participants share a single key. The server then acts as a dumb broadcast network. It's definitely not easy, which is probably a big reason no-one in this space is doing it.
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    You lose a lot of features, too. No calling in from a normal telephone if your Internet connection sucks. Everyone has to share the same stream, so no tailoring res/bitrate/etc to individual participants.
- Phlogistique 7y ago
  Though it is probably not practical today, there exists a research field for this kind of problems. The keyword is "homomorphic encryption".
- michaelt 7y ago
  1. Clients negotiate end-to-end encryption session key between themselves the same way as a chat app would. 2. Each client sends the server two (or more) encrypted video streams, varying in bandwidth and keyframes per second, with unencrypted markers showing where they can be sliced and joined. If you can upload a 1080p stream, chances are you've got the bandwidth to send a 360p stream too! 3. Each client tells the server which other call participants they'd like to see, and the server sends them the appropriate encrypted streams, switching between low and high bandwidth as appropriate.
  - sarakayakomzin 7y ago
    a few problems: >Clients negotiate end-to-end encryption session key between themselves the same way as a chat app would. how are you doing this exactly? a 50 way diffie-hellman that renegotiates every time a user leaves or joins? How do you plan on doing that without any substantial lag? >2. Each client sends the server two (or more) encrypted video streams, varying in bandwidth and keyframes per second you have managed to double your egress for almost no value.
ohirge 7y ago
I never saw anyone advertising zoom had E2E. Who expected that? There are so many privacy concerns with zoom... not surprising they don't encrypt meetings.
- tonyztan 7y ago
  "Zoom... claims to implement end-to-end encryption, widely understood as the most private form of internet communication, protecting conversations from all outside parties. In fact, Zoom is using its own definition of the term, one that lets Zoom itself access unencrypted video and audio from meetings."
  - gtirloni 7y ago
    That's what the article is saying, not Zoom. Can you point to a Zoom-owned page that says they have e2e video encryption?
    - tonyztan 7y ago
      From Zoom's website: "The following in-meeting security capabilities are available to the meeting host: Secure a meeting with end-to-end encryption" https://zoom.us/security https://zoom.us/security https://web.archive.org/web/20200331095358/https://zoom.us/security https://web.archive.org/web/20200331095358/https://zoom.us/s...
      - ohirge 7y ago
        Ok owned
Insanity 7y ago
Another day, another Zoom issue. I've resolved to not using Zoom - when it was suggested at work I just posted links to the issues (mostly gotten from HN actually) so we decided against it.
- Krasnol 7y ago
  Well, they became the popular go to solution because the other popular solutions suck. Now they are also in the focus of privacy interested media and therefore end up becoming stories. The Intercept didn't care about Zoom a few months ago and wouldn't have without Corona.
  - XelNika 7y ago
    > The Intercept didn't care about Zoom a few months ago and wouldn't have without Corona. The 2019 Zoom vulnerability[1] was a much bigger deal and did get picked up by the media. Zoom already had a terrible reputation before COVID-19. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298
    - Krasnol 7y ago
      Yeah, it was picked up because it was a much bigger deal. Now the issues are a smaller deal but are still being picked up. Most people I work with haven't even heard about Zoom until those last months when they've been forced to use a teleconference for the first time in their lifes. They also probably didn't even hear about the issue last year too.
      - XelNika 7y ago
        I'm still not convinced this coverage is in any way related to Zoom's current popularity or COVID-19, I just think a company that keeps fucking up is a better story than a one-off.
        Krasnol 7y ago
tonyztan 7y ago
Original title: "Zoom Meetings Aren't End-to-End Encrypted, Despite Misleading Marketing" For some reason, the title was trimmed an hour after submission to omit the "misleading marketing" part. The ranking also appears to have artificially been lowered. Now it is below some other posts that are older and with fewer points.
- Flimm 7y ago
  The story is about the deception, not about whether Zoom has a particular feature or not. I am disappointed in the moderators.
  - Flimm 7y ago
    It looks like the title was modified again, to include "despite marketing". Thank you, moderators! Please feel free to delete this comment and my comment above it.
- cpach 7y ago
  Regarding the ranking: This post is currently #1 on the front page. It was posted around 08:00 UTC. In my experience it is generally very hard to get traction for a post that is posted before ~14:00 UTC. This is a site with lots of US users, and it’s still early on the west coast (07:18 PDT). This post managed to climb to the top despite that, probably because Zoom is a company that is interesting to techies, the article is from a well-regarded news source (at least in this crowd), it covers misleading marketing, it’s a bit related to Covid-19 and it also touches the topic of E2EE.
  - tonyztan 7y ago
    Interesting. It reached #2 an hour after submission, and then it suddenly dropped to position #13 within the same hour, around the same time when it was renamed by the mods. #2: https://imgur.com/a/qgKQWxU https://imgur.com/a/qgKQWxU Sudden Drop to #13: https://imgur.com/a/6beWUHG https://imgur.com/a/6beWUHG
mtthwn 7y ago
I used wire before is opensourced parts of the backend. I thought it was well designed and interesting. They claim to be the only video conferencing with end to end encryption that is opensource. https://wire.com/en/features/encrypted-voice-video/ https://wire.com/en/features/encrypted-voice-video/ Has anyone followed wire more closely?
- lozf 7y ago
  I've heard nothing about Wire recently. Wickr.com is another similar service that claims to be end-to-end encrypted, but again I haven't seen much about them at all.
  - prophesi 7y ago
    I think no news is good news in this case. And a positive for Wire is that since it's all open source, you can go right to their github and see how active their development is. It would be nice if The Intercept and other journalists would include these actually E2E-encrypted alternatives besides the Mac/iOS-only FaceTime.
- zahllos 7y ago
  Yes. Firstly, classical VOIP including ones involving video have two stages: a signalling protocol called session initialization protocol (SIP). Secondly they have a real-time protocol, or RTP. SIP is used so that clients can find each other over the internet. If they can punch through their firewall, great. If not they might need help from STUN servers. Once done, the clients then talk to each other using RTP directly, not via the central server. In the SRTP variant, this involves using DTLS, i.e. peer-to-peer TLS. Wire does calling, except the SIP part is replaced by the existing messaging system they already have: the double ratchet. So if you want to call, that's just another end to end encrypted state of the art message exchange to signal that fact and agree a key. The original RFC for SRTP isn't great and many of those options are still supported in implementations. Here's the RFC for SRTP: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3711#section-4 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3711#section-4 . This document would likely result in tptacek banging his head so much on his keyboard that he manages to write a perl script capable of mind control that runs wild, turns on its creator and turns him into a PGP and DNSSEC loving zealot (presumably the motivation would be spite for having been written in perl). Or with a little less hyberbole, the crypto is a product of the times in which that spec was written, and we'd do better now. I mean... NULL cipher? We have that option already. It's just plain RTP without the S. According to this survey of SRTP security: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7201 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7201 some sane options (AES-GCM and to a certain extent AES-CCM, but AES-SIV would have been better) are available, defined in rfc 7714. I have found this post from 2017 indicating that GCM support exists in the webrtc library: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/discuss-webrtc/fz3khhADJNc https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/discuss-webrtc/fz3kh... I can't see any evidence in the codebase right now that there's any attempt to do anything custom with SRTP for Wire (SRTP used because of WebRTC), so, I assume that they're simply using whatever is available by default for video/voice as provided by Electron and/or your browser. SRTP also leaks metadata all over the show: https://webrtc-security.github.io/#4.3.4 https://webrtc-security.github.io/#4.3.4. I can't find any evidence existing audits have looked into the security of the voice/video protocol. They appear mostly to have focused on: a) the X3DH/Signal Protocol implementation and b) a high level audit of the whole application. So far we're just talking point-to-point. Things get fun when you want group chat: do you a) establish any-to-any multicast (can be encrypted e2e) and let clients composite the video onto their (possibly low powered phone) screen or b) provide and RTP mixer (mitm), that needs the raw unencrypted video to combine it and provide a unified stream? Presumably Zoom opted for the latter; as far as I understand it Wire etc have opted for the former. I don't own any Apple Devices so it's hard to look into their offerings, but MDG in the article states they've managed it. For Text, having copied Signal, Wire have some claim to be the most secure platform (or rather, one of them). However, I suspect that actually everybody in this space sucks really badly and nobody is actually looking into it. In short, the security of text messages is about as state of the art as you can get. The security of video/voice, for _all_ "secure messengers", likely leaks a bit of metadata at best, and might use some funky 2000s era crypto at worst. tl;dr they're using exactly the same standards for voice/video as everyone else, no secret sauce.
DangerousPie 7y ago
FWIW on my version of Zoom the green lock just says "Your client connection is encrypted".
vintermann 7y ago
It's not end to end encrypted, and it apparently has the charming people of saving other people's "private" messages in the minutes if they send them during a meeting. Why did zoom suddenly become so popular? It's not like there's a shortage of options.
- DangerousPie 7y ago
  The private message thing was completely overblown though, wasn't it? From what I understood it only saves your own private messages in the log. So the only time you could get in trouble is if you exported the log and then shared the file with others without removing your private messages. So just like you took a screenshot and didn't censor the parts you wanted to keep hidden. Hardly the massive scandal that some people on Twitter seemed to try to make it.
jeffalo 7y ago
See, that's why I use co-vid. https://co-vid.github.io/join https://co-vid.github.io/join (rickroll)
jeffalo 7y ago
What, competitors like this? https://co-vid.github.io/join https://co-vid.github.io/join I see where you're coming from. The video calling scene needs something good.
upofadown 7y ago
Inherent to any e2e encryption scheme is the question; are you talking to who you think you are talking to? In other words; are you the victim of a man in the middle attack? So if you ever encounter a system that has the ease of use feature where you don't have to verify the identity of the other participant(s) with something like a identity fingerprint number then you already know you do not have all the protection that e2e encryption can provide. This is particularly relevant in a case like Zoom, where all the data goes through servers that Zoom controls making a MITM attack trivial. So we really should of known that Zoom doesn't provide complete e2e encryption already just from the lack of the identity check. Skipping the identity verification step seems to be common these days. Even Signal does that by default, but they at least make the verification of what they call "safety numbers" fairly easy and straightforward. Added: So can true e2e encryption ever be practical for conferences involving a large number of participants? Perhaps Zoom is claiming the impossible... The issues surrounding the addition of OMEMO encryption to XMPP conferences make for an entirely relevant example. What do you do if one of the participants is not known to all the others? There are lots of possible answers to that question. Added2: >The only feature of Zoom that does appear to be end-to-end encrypted is in-meeting text chat. I don't see how this can be true either based on the same thinking.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  It's true that you need an out-of-band verification to determine who the other party is in an end-to-end encrypted system. But it is not true that the absence of such a verification means you don't have end-to-end encryption. It means only that you don't know for sure who the other party is. You are only put at risk if there is an active MITM attack in progress. Depending on your threat model that's an enormous change.
  - snarf21 7y ago
    Additionally, just because you have o-o-b verification, that still doesn't mean that it is e2ee. Until you can view the source and build it yourself, who knows what back doors could exist. But this is the challenge, how do you balance security and convenience? People, by and large, aren't building source and side loading. They are going to have to take a leap and trust someone. It is a very hard problem to solve. Generally, no one cares until the one bad thing happens, then they care immensely. I've said that it is hard to get people to care about privacy when they live stream and share pictures of their life every 30 minutes already.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
So sad, still getting this wrong after so many years. I was part of a startup Sococo some 8 years ago. We had end-to-end encryption right out of the box. Plus video, document sharing, chat. All encrypted, end to end with rotating keys. Up to 100 people in a meeting, sharing and chatting indiscriminately. Its gone now, and the new folks are starting way down the feature ladder from where we were. It's disappointing. Now its 'good' if you can get 6 in a conference. I hear Zoom can support large meetings. So they may be doing something right.
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  I remember using sococo in a Boston based Startup Accelerator with around 30 employees - it head incredibly good performance even running from the browser and with all employees participating. You could see a virtual layout of rooms and where you could knock and see who was in which room. It was such an innovative approach and a wow moment that is really rare. I miss Sococo until today and have never found anything like it again. I got to know your CEO over dinner in Boston and am not surprised he threw it all under the bus. My boss at the time who introduced us tuned out to be a major scam artist who got rich peddling grey market pharmaceuticals online but claimed it was from selling a pre-web chat/gaming platform to Murdoch - he was also infamous for being the main investor of StartCom which we all know what happened to them (WoSign). The 2 guys got on like a house on fire.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Yeah he spent all our runway on hiring marketing buddies then got fired. Then we got bought and had to switch to WebRTC junk. I volunteered to be downsized (I had written the audio/video/chat/control transport that was discarded).
- libraryatnight 7y ago
  When our company picked up Zoom we did a test and had 100 users all on camera and it worked flawlessly.
  - 7y ago
cat199 7y ago
the statement: The encryption that Zoom uses to protect meetings is TLS, the same technology that web servers use to secure HTTPS websites. This means that the connection between the Zoom app running on a user’s computer or phone and Zoom’s server is encrypted in the same way the connection between your web browser and this article (on https://theintercept.com) is encrypted. This is known as transport encryption, which is different from end-to-end encryption because the Zoom service itself can access the unencrypted video and audio content of Zoom meetings. jumbles TLS with end to end. zoom could e.g. proxy or support rendevous of peer to peer connections and still use TLS to negotiate end-to-end encryption between the clients (though this would be MITMable). anyway.
- notRobot 7y ago
  Please don't use code blocks for quotes. It makes it very hard to read text on mobile, narrow viewports or via screen readers.
jtdev 7y ago
Fuck these guys. This isn't the first time they've been caught being dishonest and deceptive: https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/daily-news-roundup-mac-exploit-activates-webcams-without-your-permission/ https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/daily-news-roundup-mac-exploit...
- unityByFreedom 7y ago
  > If you have Zoom installed and visit that website, you will be auto-joined to a call, and your webcam activated without any interaction on your part—even if you closed Zoom before clicking the link. > Worse yet, uninstalling Zoom doesn’t remove the web server. The web server can reinstall Zoom on its own as well. So if you visit a malicious link, it can reinstall Zoom, join you to a call, and start your webcam, all without any interaction from you. What the &@$##!! How long has Zoom been around, how did it become popular (or did it ever), and why are people still using it?
Spivak 7y ago
Are people just looking for things to be mad at Zoom for at this point? When Zoom says E2E encryption they're using older notion when it was common for services to not use encryption at all for these kinds of things and it was somewhat of a technical accomplishment that every client-server-server-client leg was all encrypted. Like it's fine to point out that the bar has been raised in the security community and that the term E2E now requires that only the participants be able to decrypt the content and they should change their copy but it ignores the fact that E2E in healthcare means exactly what Zoom is doing. In the HIPPA world providers are trusted entities.
- jefftk 7y ago
  I've always understood E2E to mean that it's encrypted from one end to the other, without any intermediate decryption stops. This is how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_encryption defines it, and has since it was a stub in 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=End-to-end_encryption&oldid=144566198 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=End-to-end_encryp...). Do you have any links for E2E being used in this "older" way?
  - PopeDotNinja 7y ago
    A simple example could be something like using TLS or DTLS between all nodes in the network. But that doesn't mean data on a Zoom server sitting in the middle of a call is encrypted.
    - DCKing 7y ago
      The point is that the term "E2E encryption" was never used for "there is TLS involved". Because that's not what end-to-end means. E2E encryption was always clearly defined as "only the two communicating parties can access the information". Using the term "E2E encryption" in other ways is deliberately confusing. Edit: and pretending that E2E encryption meant something else in some unspecified past is revising history.
      - 7y ago
floatingatoll 7y ago
Zoom’s HIPAA product documentation does define Zoom’s “end-to-end encryption” as: https://zoom.us/docs/doc/Zoom-hipaa.pdf https://zoom.us/docs/doc/Zoom-hipaa.pdf > Meeting data transmitted across the network is protected using a unique Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with a 256-bit key generated and securely distributed to all participants at the start of each session. It does not guarantee that the key is withheld from the server, which is unsurprising given that e.g. the recording and chat history features are implemented server-side. EDIT: For comparison, the Australian government provides a telehealth platform that clearly states it does not allow the server to inspect the call video/audio: https://help.vcc.healthdirect.org.au/about-healthdirect-video-call/privacysecurityandscalability https://help.vcc.healthdirect.org.au/about-healthdirect-vide... > Data shared in actual calls between participants is only ever available in decrypted form to the participating endpoints of the call. All other intermediaries that forward the call can only see encrypted data. For those looking to hold Zoom accountable, the question to ask is: “Does your country’s law permit Zoom’s servers to be considered an ‘endpoint’ capable of decrypting a telehealth call?”.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  As a note, to be HIPAA compliant you also need to sign a BAA with Zoom. This, interestingly, disables cloud capture and a bunch of other things. https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207652183-HIPAA-Business-Associate-Agreement-BAA- https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207652183-HIPAA-Bu...
- m11a 7y ago
  I'm not sure a company can make their own definition of "end-to-end encryption" and say they're E2E because they meet their own definition of the term. Sure, they're legally in the green perhaps. But this is not E2E, it is not the decades-long definition of E2E, and this is ultimately deceptive marketing.
crazygringo 7y ago
This really is false marketing, but technically what they're doing seems reasonable. Key quote: > Matthew Green, a cryptographer and computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, points out that group video conferencing is difficult to encrypt end to end. That’s because the service provider needs to detect who is talking to act like a switchboard, which allows it to only send a high-resolution videostream from the person who is talking at the moment, or who a user selects to the rest of the group, and to send low-resolution videostreams of other participants. This type of optimization is much easier if the service provider can see everything because it’s unencrypted... This isn’t impossible, though, Green said, as demonstrated by Apple’s FaceTime, which allows group video conferencing that’s end-to-end encrypted. “It’s doable. It’s just not easy.” Group videoconferencing is inherently centralized through a server that needs to analyze video/audio not only for signals as to who's talking, but also mix normalized audio and re-encode streams not just for lower thumbnail resolutions, but for clients with different bitrates. I don't doubt that FaceTime finds a way to do this, but everyone is using Zoom instead because its performance is way better. I'm not entirely sure that all the necessary signal processing can be done performantly client-side, especially when you're allowing for a wide variety of endpoints (WebRTC, phone calls, etc.). You certainly can't mix encrypted audio (at least to the best of my knowledge?), for instance, which means increased bandwidth to everyone to handle overlapping speakers (someone interjecting "could I just say something?" while two other people are talking). Also, handling key management for groups of people where you don't have the bandwidth to re-encrypt the stream separately for each receiver is very complex too, and in the end you're basically just going to have to trust that Zoom itself can't access the keys. Because usually Zoom will be able to, so that it can handle phone dial-ins. But regardless... while Zoom should absolutely advertise full encryption, Zoom should absolutely not advertise end-to-end encryption. That's bad, and harms user trust in security overall when advertised technical terms become meaningless.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to sell consulting services, and guarantee 100% on time delivery with zero defects. Which is why, when I was consulting, I did not promise these things, nor did I say things that could be easily misunderstood to imply them.
r721 7y ago
>if you'd like to dial into the Cabinet tomorrow, the Zoom meeting ID has helpfully been included in this screenshot https://twitter.com/matthewchampion/status/1244989139889664002 https://twitter.com/matthewchampion/status/12449891398896640...
- DangerousPie 7y ago
  Most Zoom meetings should have passwords these days. Unless whoever created the meeting disabled that.
  - Traster 7y ago
    Just email Michael Gove and ask for it... because his personal email is also in the screenshot.
m3kw9 7y ago
If you read their white paper it only says E2E encryption applies to Zoom chat. Although they seem a bit loose on the wording, they should clarify video is just TLS encrypted. https://zoom.us/docs/doc/Zoom-Security-White-Paper.pdf https://zoom.us/docs/doc/Zoom-Security-White-Paper.pdf
maerF0x0 7y ago
> In fact, Zoom is using its own definition of [end-to-end encryption], one that lets Zoom itself access unencrypted video and audio from meetings. It's not a standard. If you want compliance to a standard then create/adopt/require one. When you go by marketing materials all you have is "Trust us, everything will be fine"
hipaulshi 7y ago
Do people still remember Telegram don't have E2E encryption on by default? and does not work across multiple platforms when E2E is on? I am annoyed because those are my favorite apps and they don't have what's important.
- octorian 7y ago
  No, they still have to be constantly reminded.
Zelphyr 7y ago
Zoom seems to have adopted the "Move fast and break things" mentality and it's catching up with them. Don't have real E2E encryption? Don't say you do. Don't wave away a giant security vulnerability as "a feature". Don't explain monitoring and tracking as something you need to do for advertising when you don't show advertising. Their product may be superior in quality compared to the competition but their Marketing and PR teams comes across as bush league at best. The only incident I can give them any credit for is the Facebook reporting. They handled that well in my opinion by admitting the problem existed and immediately resolved that issue.
hota_mazi 7y ago
Short version: Zoom video is encrypted to external attackers but not to Zoom (the company) itself. This is important because the company could be compelled to release such videos if subpoena'ed, or they could also simply be hacked.
- president 7y ago
  Or provided to governments as per local laws and regulations. Very concerning given how many companies are trusting their internal secrets to Zoom.
ds 7y ago
So, I got around a issue like this in the past by using url fragments. I imagine the same thing could work for zoom? Basically you would join a meeting by going to zoom.us/meeting-id-number#secrethashtag The "secrethashtag" is never sent to the server, but can be accessed by javascript on the client end. Im not sure if this would be acceptable for security nuts though, as I am sure they would make the argument zoom could insert some nefarious js to intercept the url fragment.
kats 7y ago
Where's the FTC? Imagine if Facebook did this. There would be a fine of hundreds of millions of dollars.
calimac 7y ago
China's Google initiative has access to download the sessions it targets for analysis.
ceohockey60 7y ago
Interested in getting more informed on the performance penalties of a proper E2E implementation for videoconferencing use cases. If Zoom implements proper E2E like Facetime, would it be more laggy, less able to handle meetings of more than 50 people, etc.? Will the general user experience degrade noticeably?
fataliss 7y ago
This is how you realize the power of marketing. Despite many other options for video calls out there, Zoom seems to be grabbing the biggest slice of the pie, while not being provenly any better or superior to alternatives. See DHH's tweet: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1243907341868609537?s=20 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1243907341868609537?s=20 as well as others (he's been pretty vocal about zoom's flaws) :)

1230 points by tony101 7y ago

Zoom has received a fair bit of critical feedback lately. Has anyone given other platforms such as Vidyo identical levels of scrutiny?

ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
TBF it's mostly short sellers doing this, because the complaints have been... poor. The first one was about an advertisement pixel, which everybody is doing but for some reason surfaced only for Zoom. The second one is end-to-end encryption, which is not expected at all for VC apps. NOBODY does it!
- fsh 7y ago
  I really hope that this stupid "short seller conspiracy" meme is going away soon. According to the article Apple does end-to-end encryption for video conferences. Also other providers are not lying about it like zoom does.
  - ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
    Apple has a VC product? I wasn't aware of this
    - fsh 7y ago
      FaceTime can do group chats since 2018.
- honesttoss 7y ago
  >NOBODY does it! Irrelevant. That as nothing to due with the fact that they say they are. Zoom is being completely dishonest, and as some other commented here, some orgs like in health care area, have E2E encryption as requirement, Zoom says they have, but don't. It's literally fraud.
  - gtirloni 7y ago
    Where does it say they have e2e video encryption? I can only find something about chats.
    - mabcat 7y ago
      https://zoom.us/healthcare https://zoom.us/healthcare "Achieve HIPAA (signed BAA) and PIPEDA/PHIPA compliance with complete end-to-end 256-bit AES encryption."
      - drjesusphd 7y ago
        What if one pays $200/mo for the HIPAA-compliant plans?
      - ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
        1. HIPAA et al have very specific meaning that do not have anything to do with end-to-end encryption at all. If you know this, read this line, and care about HIPAA you know exactly this. 2. end-to-end has several meanings, for users it means what Signal does, for machines it means TLS is securing edges.
- phonon 7y ago
  > NOBODY does it! Google Duo does. https://support.google.com/duo/answer/9280240?hl=en https://support.google.com/duo/answer/9280240?hl=en
  - ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
    It is not a VC application, it's a user chat application
    - phonon 7y ago
      You can have a group call with up to 12 people now. https://www.neowin.net/news/google-duo-now-supports-up-to-12-people-in-a-group-video-call/ https://www.neowin.net/news/google-duo-now-supports-up-to-12...
vmednis 7y ago
I'm usually not the one for conspiracy theories and this is most likely just media outlets fixating on one topic for clicks, but sometimes this just feels like a smear campaign against Zoom. I'm sure a lot of these issues could be found for other providers as well.
- Flimm 7y ago
  Name one provider that claims to provide end-to-end encrypted video calls but doesn't.
  - vmednis 7y ago
    GoToMeeting claims end to end encryption[1] and in the same sentence say it's just SSL just like Zoom. Never the less they offer call-in as well so end to end becomes impossible right there. I have serious doubts about any conference software offering real end to end encryption as it's unrealistic for clients to be dealing with that many av streams. 1. https://support.goto.com/meeting/help/security-faqs-g2m050014 https://support.goto.com/meeting/help/security-faqs-g2m05001...
    - comex 7y ago
      End-to-end encryption doesn't require participants to receive full-quality video from everyone. Each client can be responsible for encoding their own video feed at multiple quality levels simultaneously – what WebRTC calls simulcasting. That does increase required processing power and upload bandwidth, but not to the point of infeasibility. And you do inevitably leak the identity of the person currently talking, as the server has to know whether to relay the high- or low-quality video stream for each participant to each other participant, and it can trivially tell the difference between the two based on bitrate. But that's much less bad than leaking the whole video stream.
      - xenonite 7y ago
        To add on this, an encrypted stream with a variable bitrate encoding allows to guess the amount of transmitted information entropy.

sieabahlpark 7y ago

Considering you can call into it with a phone. Duh? Unless you explicitly disable calling in with a phone you can't really ensure E2E encryption.

Flimm 7y ago

This is not "slightly" dishonest on Zoom's part. It is dishonest. Edit: now that the title has been modified, I feel I need to add back context. Zoom claims to support end-to-end encryption when it doesn't. That is dishonest.

tyingq 7y ago
"Zoom for the Enterprise Secure and reliable End-to-end 256-bit AES encryption, data sovereignty, and role-based access control" Right on the front page. So, it would seem dishonest, yes.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  There's the technical definition of "end-to-end" that we all know here—encrypted at one endpoint and decrypted at the other—but I'm wondering how well-understood that term is in broader context. I could see someone saying "end-to-end" encrypted meaning that each segment in the path is encrypted, but with the intermediate nodes decrypting and re-encrypting the payload. Perhaps we should try to come up with a more specific term? Or we should at least be aware of the potential for confusion. Not excusing Zoom here—they should know better.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    "End to end encryption" is the more specific term! The specific term for each segment being encrypted is "link encryption". The general term is plain "encryption".
  - unityByFreedom 7y ago
    end-to-end isn't some marketing phrase like "the cloud", it has a technical meaning. They flat out lied
  - pulse7 7y ago
    It seems that HN is flooded with commenters trying to redefine the well-established meaning of strong E2E encryption. I ask myself if there is any motivation for such comments?

timkam 7y ago

I guess Zoom says they're end-to-end encrypted because they're using WebRTC, which probably means traffic is end-to-end encrypted after signaling, but users need to trust that zoom's signaling server doesn't do anything fishy. Edit: I do not understand the reason for the downvotes. I am not defending the practice but am just describing their potential line of explanation. Please let me know explicitly if my comment is technically incorrect. Also, I would be interested what other vendors claim, who probably use similar technology under the hood.

fsh 7y ago
Video conferences via WebRTC usually have a central server that distributes all the video streams and are therefore not end-to-end encrypted.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  End to End encryption in conferences of >2 participants causes substantial quality degradation for the same bandwidth use, since you can't have a central server re encoding streams to produce low quality streams for those participants who need it. I believe zooms reputation as being more likely to 'just work' in part hinges on that,
  - shuckles 7y ago
    That's a fair technical tradeoff, but you can't have it both ways.
  - anticensor 7y ago
    If end-to-end symmetrical is not feasible then use fully homomorphic public key encryption, which will allow operations without decryption.
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      Show me any system allowing video re-encoding with this...

mabcat 7y ago

End-to-end encryption has been named as a required feature for telehealth in Australia. Interest in telehealth has gone from zero to infinity over the past two weeks for obvious reasons. So I've been trying really hard to work out if Zoom is E2E, and reached the same conclusions as the article. First, it isn't, and second, Zoom are really going out of their way to obscure that fact. It's great that The Intercept is taking a look at this, because it's absolutely beyond the capabilities of healthcare practitioners and the professional bodies to get to the bottom of. There's a ridiculous amount of confusion here, compounded by "you need to get the HIPAA version because HIPAA means privacy".

PudgePacket 7y ago
Hopefully we've reconsidered the laws of mathematics in the last few years ... https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathematics-dont-apply-here-says-australian-pm/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema... "“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” said Turnbull. Turnbull’s comments came as he proposed a new law to force tech companies to give security services access to encrypted messages." "The UK home secretary Amber Rudd has previously called encryption “completely unacceptable” and the UK prime minister Theresa May has said that the big internet companies give terrorists “safe spaces” to communicate." Going to have to get over this first :/
- ignoramous 7y ago
  > The UK home secretary Amber Rudd has previously called encryption "completely unacceptable" ... Theresa May has said that the big internet companies give terrorists "safe spaces" to communicate. Ironically, the UK government in fact uses Zoom for all its meetings depsite privacy and security implications. Saudi Arabia, take note. Ref: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-boris-johnson-zoom-private-government-meeting-2020-3?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-boris-johnson-zo...
  - ragebol 7y ago
    So with the right URL, you can tell them yourself!

devin 7y ago

It's disappointing to see a company that has better tech than its rivals playing these games. I have been singing Zoom's praises, but this really makes me want to look elsewhere. What a bummer.

mulmen 7y ago
Zoom has always been shady as hell. Between the ridiculous web server on MacOS, web client anti-patterns and other endless nonsense the only explanation for their popularity is good marketing.
- AlphaSite 7y ago
  I dont know, their competitors are probably the reason for their popularity. It’s definitely a space with a lack of genuinely UX focused competitors.
  - mulmen 7y ago
    Sure but that’s kind of like saying Wells Fargo has competitive interest rates. The advertised product isn’t the problem. It’s everything they make you take along with it.
- netflixandkill 7y ago
  The explanation for their popularity is that it isn't a constant struggle to use zoom for meetings. Their software may have other problems, but people can run it and get into a meeting with minimal effort. Yesterday by comparison half the people on a Skype meeting had to dial into an audio bridge with their cell phones because their computer audio didn't work for no fucking reason, and screen sharing kept lagging unless restarted every so often. The good marketing for zoom is that webex is awful.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    >The good marketing for zoom is that webex is awful. 100% this. We switched to zoom as stay home orders came out. And only because it worked 100% every time, with little to no fiddling. The non-tech literate employees at my place are patting themselves on the back for being able to set up and host a zoom meeting. Because it's one button. And that's why they're used so much. They are the literal definition of it just works. People aren't worried about anything else right now.

narsil 7y ago

I am willing to chalk this up to an honest mistake considering "end-to-end" encryption as being from the client's end to the server, although that's not the accepted use of the term. This appears to be their explanation. I hope their marketing team fixes this now that it's been pointed out to them though.

mulmen 7y ago
That’s not an honest mistake. It’s an inexcusable fuckup. End to end encryption is not a difficult concept. Redefining the “ends” doesn’t excuse Zoom’s continually shady behavior.
thesimon 7y ago
I am willing to chalk this up to an honest mistake considering "encryption" as being compression, although that's not the accepted use of the term. This appears to be their explanation. I hope their marketing team fixes this now that it's been pointed out to them though.
t0mas88 7y ago
A single honest mistake in the privacy/security area is already close to inexcusable. Zoom has a proven terrible track record in anything security and privacy related. So letting this one go would be very very naive.
albedoa 7y ago
Since this comment was written, narsil (Vinod Chandruis) has edited his profile to remove the fact that he is a co-founder of Kloudless. You can see it cached in google search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=narsil+kloudless https://www.google.com/search?q=narsil+kloudless Kloudless is currently promoting security solutions on their twitter timeline.
albedoa 7y ago
Since this comment was written, narsil (Vinod Chandruis) has edited his profile to remove the fact that he is a co-founder of Kloudless. You can see it cached in google search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=narsil+kloudless https://www.google.com/search?q=narsil+kloudless Kloudless is currently promoting security solutions on their twitter timeline.

catmanjan 7y ago

Does anyone know of a video conferencing system (3++++ participants) that actually does do end-to-end encryption?

ekimekim 7y ago
It looks like WebRTC doesn't support it, so basically no-one can because all these browser-based technologies end up just being WebRTC in the end. From the Jitsi Meet README: > WebRTC does not (yet) provide a way of conducting multi-party conversations with end-to-end encryption. Unless you consistently compare DTLS fingerprints with your peers vocally, the same goes for one-to-one calls.
- nschoe 7y ago
  I don't understand "WebRTC doesn't support it". What do you mean? WebRTC uses an external signalling channel to negotiate ICE candidates, codecs, and necessary information to establish a media communication. Once this is done, the visio/audio conference is P2P and encrypted from the caller to the callee: how is this not E2E? (Genuinely curious, not criticizing) That is, if you're not using a TURN relay server, which is easy enough to know. Maybe you meant that multi-party (one-to-many or many-to-many) calls are not E2E. Again I'm not too sure I understand: it is possible to have multi-party conf calls: each participants can encrypt its media stream and send it to the N-1 other participants. Obviously this costs a lot of CPU (for multiple encryption) and a lot of uplink because the same stream is sent N-1 times. But it is __possible__, and certainly viable with only 3 or 4 participants, provided people have a decent connection (WebRTC uses adapative bitrate streaming [0] to compensate for bandwith usage). Then again, I know that generally, with WebRTC people would use MCU [1] when dealing with many-to-many conf calls, and then I agree it breaks E2E. But for the other mentioned cases, WebRTC is E2E, isn't it? Again, I'm genuinely curious about this, not trying to criticize or undermine. Thank! [0]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming [1]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Multipoint_control_unit https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Multipoint_control_unit
  - Kalium 7y ago

0x006A 7y ago

how can you have end-to-end encryption with server side processing in conference calls with 50 participants?

ekimekim 7y ago
You abandon the server-side processing part and have all 50 participants share a single key. The server then acts as a dumb broadcast network. It's definitely not easy, which is probably a big reason no-one in this space is doing it.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  You lose a lot of features, too. No calling in from a normal telephone if your Internet connection sucks. Everyone has to share the same stream, so no tailoring res/bitrate/etc to individual participants.
Phlogistique 7y ago
Though it is probably not practical today, there exists a research field for this kind of problems. The keyword is "homomorphic encryption".
michaelt 7y ago
1. Clients negotiate end-to-end encryption session key between themselves the same way as a chat app would. 2. Each client sends the server two (or more) encrypted video streams, varying in bandwidth and keyframes per second, with unencrypted markers showing where they can be sliced and joined. If you can upload a 1080p stream, chances are you've got the bandwidth to send a 360p stream too! 3. Each client tells the server which other call participants they'd like to see, and the server sends them the appropriate encrypted streams, switching between low and high bandwidth as appropriate.
- sarakayakomzin 7y ago
  a few problems: >Clients negotiate end-to-end encryption session key between themselves the same way as a chat app would. how are you doing this exactly? a 50 way diffie-hellman that renegotiates every time a user leaves or joins? How do you plan on doing that without any substantial lag? >2. Each client sends the server two (or more) encrypted video streams, varying in bandwidth and keyframes per second you have managed to double your egress for almost no value.

ohirge 7y ago

I never saw anyone advertising zoom had E2E. Who expected that? There are so many privacy concerns with zoom... not surprising they don't encrypt meetings.

tonyztan 7y ago
"Zoom... claims to implement end-to-end encryption, widely understood as the most private form of internet communication, protecting conversations from all outside parties. In fact, Zoom is using its own definition of the term, one that lets Zoom itself access unencrypted video and audio from meetings."
- gtirloni 7y ago
  That's what the article is saying, not Zoom. Can you point to a Zoom-owned page that says they have e2e video encryption?
  - tonyztan 7y ago
    From Zoom's website: "The following in-meeting security capabilities are available to the meeting host: Secure a meeting with end-to-end encryption" https://zoom.us/security https://zoom.us/security https://web.archive.org/web/20200331095358/https://zoom.us/security https://web.archive.org/web/20200331095358/https://zoom.us/s...
    - ohirge 7y ago
      Ok owned

Insanity 7y ago

Another day, another Zoom issue. I've resolved to not using Zoom - when it was suggested at work I just posted links to the issues (mostly gotten from HN actually) so we decided against it.

Krasnol 7y ago
Well, they became the popular go to solution because the other popular solutions suck. Now they are also in the focus of privacy interested media and therefore end up becoming stories. The Intercept didn't care about Zoom a few months ago and wouldn't have without Corona.
- XelNika 7y ago
  > The Intercept didn't care about Zoom a few months ago and wouldn't have without Corona. The 2019 Zoom vulnerability[1] was a much bigger deal and did get picked up by the media. Zoom already had a terrible reputation before COVID-19. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    Yeah, it was picked up because it was a much bigger deal. Now the issues are a smaller deal but are still being picked up. Most people I work with haven't even heard about Zoom until those last months when they've been forced to use a teleconference for the first time in their lifes. They also probably didn't even hear about the issue last year too.
    - XelNika 7y ago
      I'm still not convinced this coverage is in any way related to Zoom's current popularity or COVID-19, I just think a company that keeps fucking up is a better story than a one-off.
      - Krasnol 7y ago

tonyztan 7y ago

Original title: "Zoom Meetings Aren't End-to-End Encrypted, Despite Misleading Marketing" For some reason, the title was trimmed an hour after submission to omit the "misleading marketing" part. The ranking also appears to have artificially been lowered. Now it is below some other posts that are older and with fewer points.

Flimm 7y ago
The story is about the deception, not about whether Zoom has a particular feature or not. I am disappointed in the moderators.
- Flimm 7y ago
  It looks like the title was modified again, to include "despite marketing". Thank you, moderators! Please feel free to delete this comment and my comment above it.
cpach 7y ago
Regarding the ranking: This post is currently #1 on the front page. It was posted around 08:00 UTC. In my experience it is generally very hard to get traction for a post that is posted before ~14:00 UTC. This is a site with lots of US users, and it’s still early on the west coast (07:18 PDT). This post managed to climb to the top despite that, probably because Zoom is a company that is interesting to techies, the article is from a well-regarded news source (at least in this crowd), it covers misleading marketing, it’s a bit related to Covid-19 and it also touches the topic of E2EE.
- tonyztan 7y ago
  Interesting. It reached #2 an hour after submission, and then it suddenly dropped to position #13 within the same hour, around the same time when it was renamed by the mods. #2: https://imgur.com/a/qgKQWxU https://imgur.com/a/qgKQWxU Sudden Drop to #13: https://imgur.com/a/6beWUHG https://imgur.com/a/6beWUHG

mtthwn 7y ago

I used wire before is opensourced parts of the backend. I thought it was well designed and interesting. They claim to be the only video conferencing with end to end encryption that is opensource. https://wire.com/en/features/encrypted-voice-video/ https://wire.com/en/features/encrypted-voice-video/ Has anyone followed wire more closely?

lozf 7y ago
I've heard nothing about Wire recently. Wickr.com is another similar service that claims to be end-to-end encrypted, but again I haven't seen much about them at all.
- prophesi 7y ago
  I think no news is good news in this case. And a positive for Wire is that since it's all open source, you can go right to their github and see how active their development is. It would be nice if The Intercept and other journalists would include these actually E2E-encrypted alternatives besides the Mac/iOS-only FaceTime.
zahllos 7y ago
Yes. Firstly, classical VOIP including ones involving video have two stages: a signalling protocol called session initialization protocol (SIP). Secondly they have a real-time protocol, or RTP. SIP is used so that clients can find each other over the internet. If they can punch through their firewall, great. If not they might need help from STUN servers. Once done, the clients then talk to each other using RTP directly, not via the central server. In the SRTP variant, this involves using DTLS, i.e. peer-to-peer TLS. Wire does calling, except the SIP part is replaced by the existing messaging system they already have: the double ratchet. So if you want to call, that's just another end to end encrypted state of the art message exchange to signal that fact and agree a key. The original RFC for SRTP isn't great and many of those options are still supported in implementations. Here's the RFC for SRTP: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3711#section-4 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3711#section-4 . This document would likely result in tptacek banging his head so much on his keyboard that he manages to write a perl script capable of mind control that runs wild, turns on its creator and turns him into a PGP and DNSSEC loving zealot (presumably the motivation would be spite for having been written in perl). Or with a little less hyberbole, the crypto is a product of the times in which that spec was written, and we'd do better now. I mean... NULL cipher? We have that option already. It's just plain RTP without the S. According to this survey of SRTP security: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7201 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7201 some sane options (AES-GCM and to a certain extent AES-CCM, but AES-SIV would have been better) are available, defined in rfc 7714. I have found this post from 2017 indicating that GCM support exists in the webrtc library: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/discuss-webrtc/fz3khhADJNc https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/discuss-webrtc/fz3kh... I can't see any evidence in the codebase right now that there's any attempt to do anything custom with SRTP for Wire (SRTP used because of WebRTC), so, I assume that they're simply using whatever is available by default for video/voice as provided by Electron and/or your browser. SRTP also leaks metadata all over the show: https://webrtc-security.github.io/#4.3.4 https://webrtc-security.github.io/#4.3.4. I can't find any evidence existing audits have looked into the security of the voice/video protocol. They appear mostly to have focused on: a) the X3DH/Signal Protocol implementation and b) a high level audit of the whole application. So far we're just talking point-to-point. Things get fun when you want group chat: do you a) establish any-to-any multicast (can be encrypted e2e) and let clients composite the video onto their (possibly low powered phone) screen or b) provide and RTP mixer (mitm), that needs the raw unencrypted video to combine it and provide a unified stream? Presumably Zoom opted for the latter; as far as I understand it Wire etc have opted for the former. I don't own any Apple Devices so it's hard to look into their offerings, but MDG in the article states they've managed it. For Text, having copied Signal, Wire have some claim to be the most secure platform (or rather, one of them). However, I suspect that actually everybody in this space sucks really badly and nobody is actually looking into it. In short, the security of text messages is about as state of the art as you can get. The security of video/voice, for _all_ "secure messengers", likely leaks a bit of metadata at best, and might use some funky 2000s era crypto at worst. tl;dr they're using exactly the same standards for voice/video as everyone else, no secret sauce.

DangerousPie 7y ago

FWIW on my version of Zoom the green lock just says "Your client connection is encrypted".

vintermann 7y ago

It's not end to end encrypted, and it apparently has the charming people of saving other people's "private" messages in the minutes if they send them during a meeting. Why did zoom suddenly become so popular? It's not like there's a shortage of options.

DangerousPie 7y ago
The private message thing was completely overblown though, wasn't it? From what I understood it only saves your own private messages in the log. So the only time you could get in trouble is if you exported the log and then shared the file with others without removing your private messages. So just like you took a screenshot and didn't censor the parts you wanted to keep hidden. Hardly the massive scandal that some people on Twitter seemed to try to make it.

jeffalo 7y ago

See, that's why I use co-vid. https://co-vid.github.io/join https://co-vid.github.io/join (rickroll)

jeffalo 7y ago

What, competitors like this? https://co-vid.github.io/join https://co-vid.github.io/join I see where you're coming from. The video calling scene needs something good.

upofadown 7y ago

Inherent to any e2e encryption scheme is the question; are you talking to who you think you are talking to? In other words; are you the victim of a man in the middle attack? So if you ever encounter a system that has the ease of use feature where you don't have to verify the identity of the other participant(s) with something like a identity fingerprint number then you already know you do not have all the protection that e2e encryption can provide. This is particularly relevant in a case like Zoom, where all the data goes through servers that Zoom controls making a MITM attack trivial. So we really should of known that Zoom doesn't provide complete e2e encryption already just from the lack of the identity check. Skipping the identity verification step seems to be common these days. Even Signal does that by default, but they at least make the verification of what they call "safety numbers" fairly easy and straightforward. Added: So can true e2e encryption ever be practical for conferences involving a large number of participants? Perhaps Zoom is claiming the impossible... The issues surrounding the addition of OMEMO encryption to XMPP conferences make for an entirely relevant example. What do you do if one of the participants is not known to all the others? There are lots of possible answers to that question. Added2: >The only feature of Zoom that does appear to be end-to-end encrypted is in-meeting text chat. I don't see how this can be true either based on the same thinking.

tialaramex 7y ago
It's true that you need an out-of-band verification to determine who the other party is in an end-to-end encrypted system. But it is not true that the absence of such a verification means you don't have end-to-end encryption. It means only that you don't know for sure who the other party is. You are only put at risk if there is an active MITM attack in progress. Depending on your threat model that's an enormous change.
- snarf21 7y ago
  Additionally, just because you have o-o-b verification, that still doesn't mean that it is e2ee. Until you can view the source and build it yourself, who knows what back doors could exist. But this is the challenge, how do you balance security and convenience? People, by and large, aren't building source and side loading. They are going to have to take a leap and trust someone. It is a very hard problem to solve. Generally, no one cares until the one bad thing happens, then they care immensely. I've said that it is hard to get people to care about privacy when they live stream and share pictures of their life every 30 minutes already.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

So sad, still getting this wrong after so many years. I was part of a startup Sococo some 8 years ago. We had end-to-end encryption right out of the box. Plus video, document sharing, chat. All encrypted, end to end with rotating keys. Up to 100 people in a meeting, sharing and chatting indiscriminately. Its gone now, and the new folks are starting way down the feature ladder from where we were. It's disappointing. Now its 'good' if you can get 6 in a conference. I hear Zoom can support large meetings. So they may be doing something right.

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
I remember using sococo in a Boston based Startup Accelerator with around 30 employees - it head incredibly good performance even running from the browser and with all employees participating. You could see a virtual layout of rooms and where you could knock and see who was in which room. It was such an innovative approach and a wow moment that is really rare. I miss Sococo until today and have never found anything like it again. I got to know your CEO over dinner in Boston and am not surprised he threw it all under the bus. My boss at the time who introduced us tuned out to be a major scam artist who got rich peddling grey market pharmaceuticals online but claimed it was from selling a pre-web chat/gaming platform to Murdoch - he was also infamous for being the main investor of StartCom which we all know what happened to them (WoSign). The 2 guys got on like a house on fire.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Yeah he spent all our runway on hiring marketing buddies then got fired. Then we got bought and had to switch to WebRTC junk. I volunteered to be downsized (I had written the audio/video/chat/control transport that was discarded).
libraryatnight 7y ago
When our company picked up Zoom we did a test and had 100 users all on camera and it worked flawlessly.
- 7y ago

cat199 7y ago

the statement: The encryption that Zoom uses to protect meetings is TLS, the same technology that web servers use to secure HTTPS websites. This means that the connection between the Zoom app running on a user’s computer or phone and Zoom’s server is encrypted in the same way the connection between your web browser and this article (on https://theintercept.com) is encrypted. This is known as transport encryption, which is different from end-to-end encryption because the Zoom service itself can access the unencrypted video and audio content of Zoom meetings. jumbles TLS with end to end. zoom could e.g. proxy or support rendevous of peer to peer connections and still use TLS to negotiate end-to-end encryption between the clients (though this would be MITMable). anyway.

notRobot 7y ago
Please don't use code blocks for quotes. It makes it very hard to read text on mobile, narrow viewports or via screen readers.

jtdev 7y ago

Fuck these guys. This isn't the first time they've been caught being dishonest and deceptive: https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/daily-news-roundup-mac-exploit-activates-webcams-without-your-permission/ https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/daily-news-roundup-mac-exploit...

unityByFreedom 7y ago
> If you have Zoom installed and visit that website, you will be auto-joined to a call, and your webcam activated without any interaction on your part—even if you closed Zoom before clicking the link. > Worse yet, uninstalling Zoom doesn’t remove the web server. The web server can reinstall Zoom on its own as well. So if you visit a malicious link, it can reinstall Zoom, join you to a call, and start your webcam, all without any interaction from you. What the &@$##!! How long has Zoom been around, how did it become popular (or did it ever), and why are people still using it?

Spivak 7y ago

Are people just looking for things to be mad at Zoom for at this point? When Zoom says E2E encryption they're using older notion when it was common for services to not use encryption at all for these kinds of things and it was somewhat of a technical accomplishment that every client-server-server-client leg was all encrypted. Like it's fine to point out that the bar has been raised in the security community and that the term E2E now requires that only the participants be able to decrypt the content and they should change their copy but it ignores the fact that E2E in healthcare means exactly what Zoom is doing. In the HIPPA world providers are trusted entities.

jefftk 7y ago
I've always understood E2E to mean that it's encrypted from one end to the other, without any intermediate decryption stops. This is how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_encryption defines it, and has since it was a stub in 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=End-to-end_encryption&oldid=144566198 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=End-to-end_encryp...). Do you have any links for E2E being used in this "older" way?
- PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  A simple example could be something like using TLS or DTLS between all nodes in the network. But that doesn't mean data on a Zoom server sitting in the middle of a call is encrypted.
  - DCKing 7y ago
    The point is that the term "E2E encryption" was never used for "there is TLS involved". Because that's not what end-to-end means. E2E encryption was always clearly defined as "only the two communicating parties can access the information". Using the term "E2E encryption" in other ways is deliberately confusing. Edit: and pretending that E2E encryption meant something else in some unspecified past is revising history.
    - 7y ago

floatingatoll 7y ago

Zoom’s HIPAA product documentation does define Zoom’s “end-to-end encryption” as: https://zoom.us/docs/doc/Zoom-hipaa.pdf https://zoom.us/docs/doc/Zoom-hipaa.pdf > Meeting data transmitted across the network is protected using a unique Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with a 256-bit key generated and securely distributed to all participants at the start of each session. It does not guarantee that the key is withheld from the server, which is unsurprising given that e.g. the recording and chat history features are implemented server-side. EDIT: For comparison, the Australian government provides a telehealth platform that clearly states it does not allow the server to inspect the call video/audio: https://help.vcc.healthdirect.org.au/about-healthdirect-video-call/privacysecurityandscalability https://help.vcc.healthdirect.org.au/about-healthdirect-vide... > Data shared in actual calls between participants is only ever available in decrypted form to the participating endpoints of the call. All other intermediaries that forward the call can only see encrypted data. For those looking to hold Zoom accountable, the question to ask is: “Does your country’s law permit Zoom’s servers to be considered an ‘endpoint’ capable of decrypting a telehealth call?”.

marcinzm 7y ago
As a note, to be HIPAA compliant you also need to sign a BAA with Zoom. This, interestingly, disables cloud capture and a bunch of other things. https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207652183-HIPAA-Business-Associate-Agreement-BAA- https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207652183-HIPAA-Bu...
m11a 7y ago
I'm not sure a company can make their own definition of "end-to-end encryption" and say they're E2E because they meet their own definition of the term. Sure, they're legally in the green perhaps. But this is not E2E, it is not the decades-long definition of E2E, and this is ultimately deceptive marketing.

crazygringo 7y ago

This really is false marketing, but technically what they're doing seems reasonable. Key quote: > Matthew Green, a cryptographer and computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, points out that group video conferencing is difficult to encrypt end to end. That’s because the service provider needs to detect who is talking to act like a switchboard, which allows it to only send a high-resolution videostream from the person who is talking at the moment, or who a user selects to the rest of the group, and to send low-resolution videostreams of other participants. This type of optimization is much easier if the service provider can see everything because it’s unencrypted... This isn’t impossible, though, Green said, as demonstrated by Apple’s FaceTime, which allows group video conferencing that’s end-to-end encrypted. “It’s doable. It’s just not easy.” Group videoconferencing is inherently centralized through a server that needs to analyze video/audio not only for signals as to who's talking, but also mix normalized audio and re-encode streams not just for lower thumbnail resolutions, but for clients with different bitrates. I don't doubt that FaceTime finds a way to do this, but everyone is using Zoom instead because its performance is way better. I'm not entirely sure that all the necessary signal processing can be done performantly client-side, especially when you're allowing for a wide variety of endpoints (WebRTC, phone calls, etc.). You certainly can't mix encrypted audio (at least to the best of my knowledge?), for instance, which means increased bandwidth to everyone to handle overlapping speakers (someone interjecting "could I just say something?" while two other people are talking). Also, handling key management for groups of people where you don't have the bandwidth to re-encrypt the stream separately for each receiver is very complex too, and in the end you're basically just going to have to trust that Zoom itself can't access the keys. Because usually Zoom will be able to, so that it can handle phone dial-ins. But regardless... while Zoom should absolutely advertise full encryption, Zoom should absolutely not advertise end-to-end encryption. That's bad, and harms user trust in security overall when advertised technical terms become meaningless.

braythwayt 7y ago
It would be extraordinarily difficult for me to sell consulting services, and guarantee 100% on time delivery with zero defects. Which is why, when I was consulting, I did not promise these things, nor did I say things that could be easily misunderstood to imply them.

r721 7y ago

>if you'd like to dial into the Cabinet tomorrow, the Zoom meeting ID has helpfully been included in this screenshot https://twitter.com/matthewchampion/status/1244989139889664002 https://twitter.com/matthewchampion/status/12449891398896640...

DangerousPie 7y ago
Most Zoom meetings should have passwords these days. Unless whoever created the meeting disabled that.
- Traster 7y ago
  Just email Michael Gove and ask for it... because his personal email is also in the screenshot.

m3kw9 7y ago

If you read their white paper it only says E2E encryption applies to Zoom chat. Although they seem a bit loose on the wording, they should clarify video is just TLS encrypted. https://zoom.us/docs/doc/Zoom-Security-White-Paper.pdf https://zoom.us/docs/doc/Zoom-Security-White-Paper.pdf

maerF0x0 7y ago

> In fact, Zoom is using its own definition of [end-to-end encryption], one that lets Zoom itself access unencrypted video and audio from meetings. It's not a standard. If you want compliance to a standard then create/adopt/require one. When you go by marketing materials all you have is "Trust us, everything will be fine"

hipaulshi 7y ago

Do people still remember Telegram don't have E2E encryption on by default? and does not work across multiple platforms when E2E is on? I am annoyed because those are my favorite apps and they don't have what's important.

octorian 7y ago
No, they still have to be constantly reminded.

Zelphyr 7y ago

Zoom seems to have adopted the "Move fast and break things" mentality and it's catching up with them. Don't have real E2E encryption? Don't say you do. Don't wave away a giant security vulnerability as "a feature". Don't explain monitoring and tracking as something you need to do for advertising when you don't show advertising. Their product may be superior in quality compared to the competition but their Marketing and PR teams comes across as bush league at best. The only incident I can give them any credit for is the Facebook reporting. They handled that well in my opinion by admitting the problem existed and immediately resolved that issue.

hota_mazi 7y ago

Short version: Zoom video is encrypted to external attackers but not to Zoom (the company) itself. This is important because the company could be compelled to release such videos if subpoena'ed, or they could also simply be hacked.

president 7y ago
Or provided to governments as per local laws and regulations. Very concerning given how many companies are trusting their internal secrets to Zoom.

ds 7y ago

So, I got around a issue like this in the past by using url fragments. I imagine the same thing could work for zoom? Basically you would join a meeting by going to zoom.us/meeting-id-number#secrethashtag The "secrethashtag" is never sent to the server, but can be accessed by javascript on the client end. Im not sure if this would be acceptable for security nuts though, as I am sure they would make the argument zoom could insert some nefarious js to intercept the url fragment.

kats 7y ago

Where's the FTC? Imagine if Facebook did this. There would be a fine of hundreds of millions of dollars.

calimac 7y ago

China's Google initiative has access to download the sessions it targets for analysis.

ceohockey60 7y ago

Interested in getting more informed on the performance penalties of a proper E2E implementation for videoconferencing use cases. If Zoom implements proper E2E like Facetime, would it be more laggy, less able to handle meetings of more than 50 people, etc.? Will the general user experience degrade noticeably?

fataliss 7y ago

This is how you realize the power of marketing. Despite many other options for video calls out there, Zoom seems to be grabbing the biggest slice of the pie, while not being provenly any better or superior to alternatives. See DHH's tweet: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1243907341868609537?s=20 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1243907341868609537?s=20 as well as others (he's been pretty vocal about zoom's flaws) :)