Dave: Discord's New End-to-End Encryption for Audio and Video

https://discord.com/blog/meet-dave-e2ee-for-audio-video

by hampus • 2 years ago

66 35 2 years ago

derelicta• 2 years ago

I don't really understand the reasoning between implementing E2EE for video and audio but not for chats in themselves. I feel like for those things, its either all or nothing, otherwise its mostly useless.

CuriousCosmic• 2 years ago

I'd argue it's because there's a lot of problematic content that gets shared in text that just isn't really much of an issue (or isn't viable to detect) in audio/video.

ronsor4• 2 years ago

I'd argue the opposite somewhat: there's a lot of problematic content that's an issue with audio/video, but like you said, it's not viable to detect at scale, so it's better to close the door.

boneitis4• 2 years ago

I would ordinarily have thought the same, but what immediately came to mind was the TOS update that they "generally do not store the contents of video or voice calls"[0]. (I've since forgotten what it looked like before that but remember a big reaction in the userbase.)

I wonder if those terms would be practically nullified in any way if the E2EE is enabled.

Though, maybe they would attempt to implement something like Apple's offline CSAM policing that almost (IIRC?) came to be. There is also the Whatsapp method (albeit for text-based messages) that the app client of the user reporting you will send decrypted messages to Facebook.

[0] https://discord.com/privacy

ronsor4• 2 years ago

Your other comment got auto-killed because m*sturbating is a flagged word.

That aside, I was only referring to private communications. Moderation in a public server is different, and there should be more visibility for server admins. With that said, Discord has been improving moderation tools, and I'm not sure how trolls can be stopped as long as making (or stealing) an account is easy. Remove that aspect, and half the reason for using Discord is gone.

lynndotpy• 2 years ago

The video and audio is ephemeral and only for parties which are present. Chats are expected to be stored and available to people who are not available. That's the big thing. Once you've sent a packet of video/audio, you don't need to use it ever again.

People expect to join servers and have the history available to them to search. E2EE means that history is not available, and all indexing happens client-side, all messages are stored client-side, etc.

mystified5016• 2 years ago

You know it's possible to store and serve encrypted data, right? It's not a one time use will-self-destruct-in-30-seconds deal. The data is still decryptable after it's been sent.

legitster• 2 years ago

Both parties have to consent to start a call. Chats can be unwanted/unprompted.

They are pretty transparent that they want Discord to be a moderated platform to prevent harassment and the like.

ivraatiems• 2 years ago

I've been watching a slow enshittification of Discord over the last few years and preparing to move to the Next Thing in a year or two, but this actually seems like a great move, and technically interesting. Is there a downside/drawback I'm not seeing?

slashink• 2 years ago

The goal here has been for this to be transparent to users and "just work", hopefully you should see no downsides to this! If you do, let us know!

Akashic1012• 2 years ago

This does seem a nice feature and definitely a step in the right direction but why use e2ee for video and audio but not chat? That's afterall where most of Discords activity is happening

DrillShopper2• 2 years ago

Cool, how about you let me use this with an open source client so I know the client isn't phoning the decrypted data home now.

ronsor4• 2 years ago

No, because half their premium features are dependent on them controlling the client. Even excluding relatively new things like client theming, a custom client could enable custom emojis everywhere, or make it easy to offload storage to another site to avoid paying for nitro. As long as a service is free(-to-play), there will always be a somewhat adversarial relationship between the user and the company.

mrinfinitiesx• 2 years ago

Ah yes, the selling of emojis and simple file storage.

I miss the GameSurge IRC and caleague with Mumble days.

LelouBil• 2 years ago

Did you read the article ?

To that end, the protocol is detailed in our whitepaper[0] and open-source library[1]

[0] https://github.com/discord/dave-protocol

[1] https://github.com/discord/libdave

rcxdude2• 2 years ago

That doesn't mean much when the discord TOS forbids use of anything but the official client to connect to their services. They seem to turn a blind eye to the various unofficial clients mostly, but also do occasionally ban a subset of their users occasionally despite no other TOS violations.

arielcostas• 2 years ago

How can I possibly trust the Discord client is actually using that library and not a modified version that calls home? The whole point of using open source is being able to see the entire code of the program, and compile it yourself

RadiozRadioz2• 2 years ago

I'm so tired of this. It's really simple:

If the client is proprietary and controlled by the vendor, E2EE is meaningless.

Last I checked, Discord is a proprietary application that updates itself on startup with freshly baked proprietary blobs straight from Discord Inc. They can say all they want about how great the encryption itself is, sure I believe them, but as long as alternative clients are forbidden and Discord's proprietary self-changing software exists on either end, it doesn't matter.

lxgr• 2 years ago

It's not meaningless at all at least to the vendor.

rcxdude2• 2 years ago

It's not meaningless (such applications are quite heavily inspected for signs of malfeasance by many parties that would stand to benefit from widely publicizing any backdoor), but it does substantially reduce the value, especially if your threat model includes being specifically targeted for a bypass.

7jjjjjjj• 2 years ago

You really think someone is out there reverse engineering and debugging every inch of the behemoth that is Discord, any part of which could leak the keys, or compromise them in some non-obvious way? In every release? Yeah, right.

Also, you should rethink "many parties ... would stand to benefit from widely publicizing any backdoor." A new bugdoor is found in WhatsApp every six months and nobody cares.

RadiozRadioz2• 2 years ago

The whole point of all this fancy encryption is to make it mathematically impossible for the vendor to read your messages. It doesn't matter if it's mathematically impossible for them to read messages on the server if it's operationally trivial for them to extract them from the client.

It's end-to-end encrypted, but both ends are wide open for Discord to do what they like. If not them, someone doing a supply chain attack on their frivolously & opaquely updating proprietary clients.

WhatsApp has E2EE, but how do you think they found CSAM on people's devices? Because they control the endpoints.

Dave: Discord's New End-to-End Encryption for Audio and Video

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