Keybase was founded in New York in 2014 by Chris Coyne and\nMaxwell Krohn, who were part of the founding team of OkCupid. The company has\n25 employees, who will now join Zoom. Krohn will now lead Zoom\u2019s security\nengineering team, reporting directly to Yuan. Prior to the acquisition, Keybase\nraised just under $11m in funding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The start-up has been acquired as part of Zoom\u2019s plan to\naddress security issues that have been discovered in recent months, as millions\nof remote workers have turned to the platform to host video conferences and\nmeetings. Last month, the company announced a 90-day freeze on new features in\norder to focus on security updates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yuan said that the company\u2019s goal is now to provide \u201cthe\nmost privacy possible\u201d for every use case, while balancing the needs of users\nand preventing harmful behaviour on the platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Encryption<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The company explained that, as it currently stands, audio\nand video content between Zoom clients is encrypted at each sending client\ndevice. It is not decrypted until it reaches the recipients\u2019 devices. With the\nZoom 5.0 release last month, it now supports encrypting content using\nindustry-standard AES-GCM with 256-bit keys, which are generated for each\nmeeting by Zoom\u2019s servers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSome features that are widely used by Zoom clients, such as\nsupport for attendees to call into a phone bridge or use in-room meeting\nsystems offered by other companies, will always require Zoom to keep some\nencryption keys in the cloud,\u201d Yuan added. The company said that in the near\nfuture, Zoom will offer end-to-end encryption to all paid accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAn ephemeral per-meeting symmetric key will be generated by\nthe meeting host,\u201d Yuan said. \u201cThis key will be distributed between clients,\nenveloped with the asymmetric keypairs and rotated when there are significant\nchanges to the list of attendees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe cryptographic secrets will be under the control of the\nhost, and the host\u2019s client software will decide what devices are allowed to\nreceive meeting keys, and thereby join the meeting. We are also investigating\nmechanisms that would allow enterprise users to provide additional levels of\nauthentication.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He added that encryption keys will be \u201ctightly controlled by\nthe host\u201d, who will admit attendees. \u201cWe believe this will provide equivalent\nor better security than existing consumer end-to-end encrypted messaging\nplatforms, but with the video quality and scale that has made Zoom the choice\nof over 300m daily meeting participants.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Kelly Earley On Thursday (7 May), Zoom CEO Eric Yuan announced that the company has acquired Keybase, as part of a 90-day plan to improve security on the video conferencing platform. Keybase\u2019s team of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1486,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[394,393,392],"class_list":["post-1485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-online-meeting","tag-video-conferencing","tag-zoom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/towncryyers.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/zoom-security-.jpg?resize=800%2C533&ssl=1\")
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