Is the quest for encryption just another rat race?
As the global pandemic dramatically boosted messaging apps, the pursuit of end-to-end encryption is turning out more challenging for some but nonetheless it’s the new benchmark for tech and media companies.
Founded in 2011, the same yeas as Snapchat, Zoom saw its popularity explode amid the coronavirus global pandemic, however, by the beginning of April, the video calling software faced a huge backlash after a series of security flaws led some institutions to ban its use.
On Friday May 30th, Alex Stamos, former chief security officer at Facebook and currently Zoom security consultant, confirmed the video conferencing provider’s plans to strengthen encryption of video calls hosted by paying clients and institutions.
An end-to-end model, which means no one but the participants and their devices can see and hear what is happening, would also have to exclude people who call in from a telephone line.
In March of last year, Zuckerberg made the pledge to fully encrypt user communications across all of its platforms by default however, he didn’t go into details onhow difficult the transition would be to pull off, especially for Messenger.
“While we have made progress in the planning, it turns out that adding end-to-end encryption to an existing system is incredibly challenging and involves fundamentally rethinking almost everything,” Facebook’s Jon Millican said.
Other providers of encrypted communication either charge business users or act as nonprofits, such as Signal the open-source messaging app considered to be one of the most secure available: end-to-end encryption, no metadata, no cloud backups.
Back in February the European Commission told its staff to switch to Signal as the go-to app in an effort to increase the security of its communications.
From a business perspective, it is hard to earn money when offering a sophisticated and expensive encryption service for free however, I’m curious to understand how and how much tech and media companies who will, are going to get a return of investment.
