Company News Security & Privacy

End-to-End Encryption Update

Since releasing the draft design of Zoom’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on May 22, we have engaged with a number of organizations to gather feedback.

2 min read

Updated on August 02, 2021

Published on June 17, 2020

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Eric S. Yuan

CEO

Eric founded Zoom in 2011 to deliver happiness and bring people together in a frictionless video environment. Zoom’s communications platform continues to transform the way global organizations connect, communicate, and collaborate. As the company’s chief executive, Eric led Zoom to one of the highest-performing tech IPOs of 2019.

Business Insider named Eric one of the Most Powerful People in Enterprise Tech in 2017. In 2018, Glassdoor recognized him as the top CEO for large U.S. companies. In 2019, he was recognized in the Bloomberg 50 as a leader changing the game in global business. Time Magazine named Eric its 2020 Businessperson of Year as well as one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2020. He was also named Comparably's Best CEO for Diversity in 2021.

Prior to founding Zoom, Eric was corporate vice president of engineering at Cisco, where he was responsible for Cisco's collaboration software development. Eric was also one of the founding engineers and vice president of engineering at Webex.

Eric is a named inventor on 11 issued and 20 pending patents in real-time collaboration.

Since releasing the draft design of Zoom’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on May 22, we have engaged with civil liberties organizations, our CISO council, child safety advocates, encryption experts, government representatives, our own users, and others to gather their feedback on this feature. We have also explored new technologies to enable us to offer E2EE to all tiers of users.

Today, Zoom released an updated E2EE design on GitHub. We are also pleased to share that we have identified a path forward that balances the legitimate right of all users to privacy and the safety of users on our platform. This will enable us to offer E2EE as an advanced add-on feature for all of our users around the globe – free and paid – while maintaining the ability to prevent and fight abuse on our platform.

To make this possible, Free/Basic users seeking access to E2EE will participate in a one-time process that will prompt the user for additional pieces of information, such as verifying a phone number via a text message. Many leading companies perform similar steps on account creation to reduce the mass creation of abusive accounts. We are confident that by implementing risk-based authentication, in combination with our current mix of tools -- including our Report a User function -- we can continue to prevent and fight abuse.

We plan to begin early beta of the E2EE feature in July 2020.
All Zoom users will continue to use 256-bit AES-GCM transport encryption as the default encryption for meetings, one of the strongest encryption standards in use today.
E2EE will be an optional feature as it limits some meeting functionality, such as the ability to include traditional PSTN phone lines or SIP/H.323 hardware conference room systems. Hosts will toggle E2EE on or off on a per-meeting basis.
Account administrators can enable and disable E2EE at the account and group level.

We are grateful to those who have provided their input on our E2EE design, both technical and philosophical. We encourage everyone to continue to share their views throughout this complex, ongoing process.

Editor’s note: This blog post was edited on Aug. 2, 2021 to include the most up to date information on Zoom encryption.