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Which Video Chat Apps Are the Most Secure?

October 21, 2020

Zoom has released the first phase of its end-to-end encryption (E2EE) implementation. Users now have the ability to have E2EE for meetings with up to 200 participants. What are the other options for securing your meetings? As with anything in life, it depends. Some services limit the number of participants when providing secure connections. CSO compared the security features for eight video chat apps.

Besides Zoom offering E2EE, Webex is the only other platform to offer E2EE on a large scale. Like Zoom, E2EE is not enabled by default in Webex. In addition, Webex only supports 100 participants as compared to the 200 limit for Zoom. Frankly, 100 meeting participants is pretty large from a practical point of view. Next on the list is Facetime with its limit of 32 participants for E2EE communications. The downside is that every participant must be using an Apple device. Other services (Signal, WhatsApp, Wire, Jitsi) only allow E2EE for two to four participants. Microsoft Teams and Google Meet don't offer any option for E2EE connections.

E2EE will protect the communication itself, but metadata about the call may expose important information. Unfortunately, there is no current way to encrypt the metadata and still communicate with participants. Just because you can encrypt the contents of the conversation, don't forget to consider your risk with exposure of the metadata.

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