This archive report was first published on 8 May 2020.
On May 8, 2020, Zoom announced the acquisition of Keybase, a secure messaging and file-sharing service, in a bid to strengthen the security of its video communications platform.
Keybase's team will be integrated into Zoom to help build end-to-end encryption that can reach current Zoom scalability and help the company grow its market share.
The acquisition comes after Zoom experienced some privacy and security issues last month. The firm issued a security update to give users options to add and remove participants, restrict screen sharing, and to chat in meetings.
Before the update, some of the privacy issues included Zoom's default settings, which didn't encourage passwords for meetings, and allowed participants to share their screen with randomly generated user ID numbers, which are easy to guess, allowing anyone to join any meeting.
Zoom's recent 5.0 release supports encrypting content using industry-standard AES-GCM with 256-bit keys. However, the encryption keys for each meeting are generated by Zoom's servers.
Zoom will offer an end-to-end encrypted meeting mode to all paid accounts, where logged-in users will generate public cryptographic identities that are stored in a repository on Zoom's network and can be used to establish trust relationships between meeting attendees.
