from Hacker News

Zoom E2E Encryption Explained Like You're 5

by azianmike on 4/1/20, 3:41 AM with 13 comments

• by TheObserver6955 on 4/1/20, 10:54 AM

  Zoom video conferences are NOT E2E encrypted, but they claimed it is. That is the main problem.

  Also, there are possibilitys to archive this while still beein usable. Apples FaceTime does support E2E encryption for video calls.

• by smolder on 4/1/20, 12:08 PM

  In a better world, they would be legally accountable for false claims of being end-to-end encrypted.

• by CodesInChaos on 4/1/20, 2:47 PM

  This article is rather badly written, it puts the most important part in the second to last sentence, almost as an afterthought.

  Plus Caesar encryption is a bad example, since it's so bad that you can actually compress the ciphertext using standard lossless compression algorithms.

• by doomrobo on 4/1/20, 7:34 AM

  I agree there are complications that e2e adds that makes it pretty much unfeasible for something like Zoom. But why is client-side compression not a solution to the problem statement here?

• by nkkr on 4/2/20, 3:29 AM

  "Explained Like You're 5 and don't care about the way things actually work".

  Read about Scalable Video Codecs (H.264SVC, HEVC, VP9, AV1), SFU vs MCU architectures and then try again. The real reason end-to-end encryption is hard with SFU-mediated multiparty is very different from what is being described.

• by luizfzs on 4/1/20, 6:34 PM

  It may be a naive question: what about compressing and then encrypting?

• by maytc on 4/1/20, 12:31 PM

  > Why can't we compress encrypted messages?

  Not sure if eli5, but you can compress that message. Counter example: Huffman encoding that message.