Discord now uses end-to-end encryption for all voice and video calls by default

Discord now uses end-to-end encryption for all voice and video calls across all platforms: desktop, mobile, web, and console.

It took a long time – the company first shared its plans for privacy in 2023 and began the migration process a year later…

The company said in summer 2023 that it was experimenting with end-to-end encryption, but faced challenges due to the need to introduce it without impacting latency or quality degradation for a service relying on a large number of servers.

It was a little over a year later that the company announced the protocol it would use and began a gradual migration process. This migration is now complete on all Discord platforms.

End-to-end encryption is now standard for every voice and video call on Discord, outside of stage channels. No registration required.

What makes Discord’s voice and video infrastructure unusual isn’t just the scale, it’s the diversity. A single Discord call can have someone on a laptop, someone on their phone, someone on a PlayStation, someone on an Xbox, and someone in a web browser all in the same conversation at the same time. Each of these participants expect high-quality, low-latency Discord communications, no matter what device they’re on. Building an E2EE protocol that works seamlessly on all of these surfaces simultaneously is, to my knowledge, unlike anything else that has been delivered. DAVE is probably one of the most diverse E2EE voice and video implementations on the Internet.

The company had to include a “default” addendum because, at the moment, there is still older code that would allow for unencrypted messaging. The final step is to remove this code.

To complete this migration, we have required all clients to support DAVE before joining a call. We are currently in the process of removing client code that supports the unencrypted fallback. Once this is done, it will no longer be possible to revert to unencrypted connections.

Discord says that Stage channels are also an exception because they are not personal conversations but rather broadcasts to a wider audience.