Discord has announced the launch of a new end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protocol called DAVE (Discord’s Audio and Video End-to-End Encryption), aimed at securing audio and video calls. This protocol will be used for voice and video in direct messages, group chats, voice channels, and Go Live streams.
The DAVE protocol encrypts each media frame with a unique symmetric key shared only by participants in the session, making it inaccessible to outsiders, including Discord itself. It utilizes Message Layer Security (MLS) to ensure that new participants can’t decrypt past media, and those leaving a session can’t access future content.
Although Discord’s existing transport encryption for media between clients and servers is retained, the content within each packet is fully encrypted end-to-end. However, text messages on the platform will remain unencrypted for content moderation purposes.
The protocol has been reviewed by Trail of Bits and is publicly auditable, using WebRTC encoded transforms for encryption and MLS for group key exchange. The move comes as the GSM Association (GSMA) also works on E2EE for securing messages across Android and iOS platforms.
