Strong End-to-End Encryption Comes to Discord Calls

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We’re happy to see that Discord will soon start offering a form of end-to-end encryption dubbed “DAVE” for its voice and video chats. This puts some of Discord’s audio and video offerings in line with Zoom, and separates it from tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, which do not offer end-to-end encryption for video, voice, or any other communications on those apps. This is a strong step forward, and Discord can do even more to protect its users’ communications.

End-to-end encryption is used by many chat apps for both text and video offerings, including WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, and Facebook Messenger. But Discord operates differently than most of those, since alongside private and group text, video, and audio chats, it also encompasses large scale public channels on individual servers operated by Discord. Going forward, audio and video will be end-to-end encrypted, but text, including both group channels and private messages, will not.

When a call is end-to-end encrypted, you’ll see a green lock icon. While it’s not required to use the service, Discord also offers a way to optionally verify that the strong encryption a call is using is not being tampered with or eavesdropped on. During a call, one person can pull up the “Voice Privacy Code,” and send it over to everyone else on the line—preferably in a different chat app, like Signal—to confirm no one is compromising participants’ use of end-to-end encryption. This is a way to ensure someone is not impersonating someone and/or listening in to a conversation.

By default, you have to do this every time you initiate a call if you wish to verify the communication has strong security. There is an option to enable persistent verification keys, which means your chat partners only have to verify you on each device you own (e.g. if you sometimes call from a phone and sometimes from a computer, th

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