Zoom is buying security firm Keybase, it emerged Thursday. The acquisition is intended to help the video-conferencing firm implement end-to-end encryption.
Zoom Acquisition to Help With End-to-End Encryption
Zoom’s purchase of Keybase will be its first acquisition. It is “another milestone in Zoom’s 90-day plan to further strengthen the security of our video communications platform,” founder Eric S. Yuan wrote in a blog post. “Since its launch in 2014, Keybase’s team of exceptional engineers has built a secure messaging and file-sharing service leveraging their deep encryption and security expertise,” he added Following the acquisition, the video conferencing platform intends to make end-to-end encrypted meetings available to all those with paid accounts.
[Zoom: How to Host a Meeting Safely]
Zoom has cleared the 300 million daily-users mark, as people increasingly turn to it while working from home. The company is working to reassure users it is a safe platform, following well-publicized security and privacy issues.
Charlotte:
It’s obvious that Zoom has now become a standard for large meetings in the educational, small business, non-governmental organisational and personal use spaces, and other assorted organisations and groups for whom security is not a standard if not essential operating procedure.
Our WHO pandemic meetings, an upcoming scientific advisory board meeting and and several working groups are all being done on Zoom. An upcoming briefing I’ve been asked to give to a government agency task force involved in national security will be on WebEx. I have yet to have a single teleconference with any private sector research agency, where proprietary product is under development, on Zoom (or any other non-EEE platform).
It will be interesting to see, assuming it happens, how and when Zoom implements Keybase’s EEE protocol, and under what conditions (free vs paid use).
Any platform that wishes to become an enterprise standard will have to be secure to at least an industry standard. Perhaps Zoom have a bead on that goal. The proof that it is a robust, secure platform will be secure enterprise usage.
Isn’t it amazing how outfits like Zoom react when their skullduggery is revealed. It was made public that the emperor (Zoom) had no clothes regarding privacy and security. Now the bastards are scrambling to redeem themselves out of fear Microsoft’s Teams and others may take them down.
Zoom is the best videoconferencing application, hands down. It is awesome to make PowerPoint (or whatever) presentations with audio and laser pointer, and save them as “.mp4” movie with amazingly small sizes. Try to do it with PowerPoint alone and you will get missing frames-pages and huge video sizes about five times larger!