Discord Unveils DAVE Plan for Secure Audio and Video Calls with End-to-End Encryption
The well-liked social messaging platform Discord has revealed its rollout of a fresh bespoke end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) protocol to safeguard audio and video calls.
The protocol is branded DAVE, an abbreviation for Discord’s audio and video end-to-end encryption (“E2EE A/V”).
Following the recent alteration, voice and video in DMs, Group DMs, voice channels, and Go Live streams are set to shift to utilizing DAVE.
“When contemplating the integration of new privacy attributes like E2EE A/V, we do not do so in isolation from security,” Discord expressed. “This is why security is intertwined throughout our product and policies, and why communications on Discord remain unencrypted.”
“Communications will still be handled in accordance with our content moderation approach, which enables us to provide additional security measures.”
DAVE is openly auditable and has been evaluated by Trail of Bits, utilizing WebRTC encoded transformations and Message Layer Security (MLS) for encryption and group key exchange (GKE), respectively.
This functionality enables media frames, apart from the codec metadata, to be encrypted post-encoding and decrypted pre-decoding upon reception.
“Every frame is encrypted or decrypted using a unique symmetric key from the sender,” Discord stated. “This key is shared among all participants of the audio and video session but is unknown by any unauthorized party outside the call, including Discord.”
Conversely, the implementation of MLS enables participants to enter or exit a voice or video session on Discord in a manner that prevents new members from decrypting media sent before their arrival and departing members from decrypting media transmitted thereafter.
“Discord’s current transport encryption for audio and video communication between the client and our selective forwarding unit (SFU) remains intact, ensuring that only audio and video from authenticated participants are forwarded,” it emphasized.
“Although the SFU processes all packets for the call, the audio and video content inside each packet are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be deciphered by the SFU.”
The announcement follows shortly after the GSM Association (GSMA), the regulatory entity overseeing the evolution of the Rich Communications Services (RCS) protocol, mentioned that it is striving to implement E2EE for securing messages exchanged between the Android and iOS ecosystems.
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