Discord Makes All Voice/Video Calls E2EE

After Discord announced their DAVE end-to-end encryption protocol for audio and video calls in 2024, they’ve finally finished migrating all calls to use it by default.

The move was three years in the making, with experiments with E2EE starting all the way back in 2023.

After they introduced the finished their open-source DAVE protocol in 2024, they began migrating audio and video calls over to the new encryption.

They worked closely with renowned cybersecurity consulting firm Trail of Bits on the design and implementation of DAVE.

The migration apparently took almost two years, but it’s finally complete.

It’s hard to fault Discord for taking their time to make sure it’s implemented correctly, though. As they point out, E2EE is reliant on clients in order to function properly, and Discord is available on just about all platforms under the sun.

A user needs to be able to make the same E2EE call going from a laptop to a phone to a PlayStation seamlessly and without losing the security properties of the encryption.

For example, when working on the web version, they ran into an issue in Firefox and had to work directly with Mozilla in order to fix the issue.

It’s an approach that’s admirable: do it right the first time, so you don’t spend countless hours fixing your previous mistakes.

Discord is currently in the process of completing the final steps of the migration: removing the code for unencrypted calls, after which it won’t be possible to make an unencrypted call on Discord.

Text messages on Discord will remain unencrypted, with no current plans to upgrade to E2EE:

We have no current plans to extend E2EE to text messages. Many of the features people use on Discord were built on the assumption that text isn't end-to-end encrypted, and rebuilding them to work with encryption is a meaningful engineering challenge.

If anything, though, I think this project shows Discord is up to the challenge if they really wanted to.

It’s become a fairly standard feature in messengers to offer E2EE voice and video calls, and E2EE messaging is becoming the standard as well, especially now with the release of E2EE support in RCS clients.

The RCS encryption uses the same standard Messaging Layer Security that Discord chose for their calls, meaning a lot of the groundwork is already laid for encrypted messaging in the future.