The popular social messaging platform Discord has announced that it is releasing a new user-defined end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) protocol for secure audio and video calls.
The protocol is duplicated DAVEshort for Discord End-to-end Audio and Video Encryption (“E2EE A/V”).
As part of the changes made last week, voice and video transmissions in DMs, group DMs, voice channels and Go Live broadcasts are expected to move to using DAVE.
However, it should be noted that messages on Discord will remain unencrypted and subject to a content moderation approach.
“When we consider adding new privacy features like E2EE A/V, we don’t do it without security.” – Discord said. “That’s why security is built into our product and policy, and why messages on Discord are unencrypted.”
“Posts will continue to be subject to our approach to content moderation, allowing us to continue to offer additional security measures.”
DAVE There is publicly verified and Trail of Bits using the protocol was examined Conversions encoded by WebRTC and Message Layer Security (MLS) for encryption and group key exchange (GKE), respectively.
This allows media frames to be encrypted outside of the codec metadata after they are encoded and decoded before being decoded on the receiver side.
“Each frame is encrypted or decrypted using a symmetric key for each sender,” Discord said. “This key is known to all participants in the audio and video session, but very importantly, it is unknown to third parties outside of the call, including Discord.”
Using MLS, on the other hand, allows users to join or leave a voice or video session on Discord in such a way that neither new members can decrypt media sent before they join, nor members who leave can decrypt any media sent in the future.
“Discord’s existing transport encryption for audio and video between the client and our Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) is preserved, ensuring that only audio and video from authenticated callers are forwarded,” the post notes.
“Although the SFU still processes all packets for the call, the audio or video data inside each packet is end-to-end encrypted and cannot be deciphered by the SFU.”
This development comes days after the GSM Association (GSMA), the governing body that oversees the development of the Rich Communications Services (RCS) protocol, said he is working on an E2EE implementation for the security of messages sent between the Android and iOS ecosystems.
