A Guide to Secure Video Chat

8x8 Staff

March 11, 2021

A guide to secure video chat

With the rise of commonplace video conferencing and video chat as a core work tool in the pandemic era, there has also come a rise in security concerns. Some sites that saw a rapid rise to prominence in early 2020 found themselves under scrutiny for holes in security and misleading claims about encryption. With the need for secure video chat unlikely to go away soon, it's important to know what to look for in your chat solution for maximum peace of mind.

Here, we'll discuss some of the signal features of the most secure video chat software as modeled by 8x8 video conferencing.

Encryption is the foundation of secure video chat

End-to-end encryption is a security measure that encrypts data being transmitted from one device in such a way that only the destination device can read it. As it applies to creating a secure video chat, this ensures that each person who is connecting into the central meeting enjoys a fully encrypted connection. The difference between this and other kinds of encryption can be crucial. Encryption-in-transit, for example, introduces the server as a point of vulnerability in the process.

While end-to-end encryption is not invincible — it can still be compromised if someone directly accesses your device or if there's someone with legitimate meeting credentials who sabotages it from within — it can reliably defeat most attempts to compromise meetings with brute-force hacking. 8x8 offers end-to-end encrypted video conferencing for up to 100 users at a time.

Sophisticated moderator controls are important

Another important component of secure video chat is giving your moderators fine-grained control over who is in the meeting, when it's time to terminate a meeting, and muting or removing unexpected or uninvited participants.

There's a very good reason for this. As we alluded to above, instances of "Zoom bombing" and practices analogous to it on other services often begin as an inside job. There's someone within the meeting who has the invitation link and calls like-minded people in to troll the meeting. When this happens, it's critical that moderators have the tools at their disposal to keep intrusions under control and eject unwelcome guests.

8x8's advanced moderation features also allow your moderators to lock meetings once all the participants have joined, adjust participant permissions and delegate meeting hosts.

Other steps you can take to ensure meeting security

Going beyond features of your conferencing service, there are other common-sense steps you can take to ensure safe and secure video chat meetings. These include:

Be wary about sharing too much in online communications, especially personal or sensitive business information
Only share your meeting links directly with trusted participants (don't share them on social media, online profiles or group emails)
Track the forwarding of any messages about or invites to the meeting using alerts to check that the information is being sharing with legitimate parties (otherwise create a new meeting with new login information)
Generate a strong password and use it to secure your meeting

Following these steps will combine with the features of 8x8 videoconferencing to provide your online meetings with leading-edge security.