Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

I (en_GB) lived in that weird place called West Germany for about 10 years on and off back in the 70s and 80s. We have many friends (Hi Wurms, int al) who also have family, friends and acquaintances that lived through those days directly, shall we say, and of course my own family members who did from another side and perspective. You may want to take another look at my username and make of that what you will.

My point really does stand. You might gradually allow erosion of your rights until you find that none are left. It is so easy to say "I have nothing to hide" until you find that actually you do have something to hide for reasons that are not immediately obvious.

I am not saying that using Zoom will have nasty consequences but I am saying that the attitude that abrogates responsibility for your own privacy might have unintended consequences. If it becomes common place to simply say "meh" we might not like the world we get instead of the world we might wish for.

My Old Saxon friends have a rather more robust attitude to privacy concerns than you mate!

Security implies experience. They don't care anything about that. Just hire cogs to grind away and fire when they burn out.

I just downloaded their binary build and it worked without sudo (you need to run "ZoomLauncher" file).

That being said, I did not get the impression of an easy to use app that "just works" (at least with my tiling window manager), things were confusing, clunky and rather idiosyncratic (e.g. sharing a screen was weird, and the whiteboard did not work).

Looks like Zoom to video conference security is like Flash to web browser security.

The serverside key handling stuff is bad, but generally known (Zoom has features whose natural implementation require them to keep keys serverside).

People are dunking on Zoom for rolling their own crypto and coming up with AES-128-ECB. This is also bad, but people should be aware that it's a lot more complicated than "you can see penguins through it".

You can see penguins through an ECB-encrypted bitmap because discrete blocks of the bitmap image repeat, and thus have the same ciphertext, and these correspondences carry obvious meaning in a bitmap. The same is not automatically true of video or audio data with normal codecs. Aaron Toponce points out that sensor noise will likely scramble ECB ciphertexts, for instance.

Colm MacCárthaigh makes an even more important point, which is that it's already very trick to reliably encrypt voice tracks, because common encoding and transmission techniques make them susceptible to traffic analysis. So, for instance, you can quickly find papers about exploiting silence suppression to make predictions about speech in an encrypted audio channel. The point here being, cryptanalytic attacks on ECB are unlikely to be anyone's first recourse.

Obviously, the 128 bit AES key thing doesn't really have any practical impact.

Designers should religiously avoid ECB mode, but the real danger of ECB is in interactive settings, where we as attackers get to induce plaintext patterns, and use chosen boundaries to isolate targeted ciphertext. Bulk video and audio transmission isn't that kind of interactive setting. You still don't want to read people saying that ECB is OK; it's bad.

Essentially: it seems like Zoom's cryptography is bad, but not in a way that really matters compared to brochure-level badness of non-end-to-end-encryption.