Video conferencing platform Zoom acquires Keybase to strengthen security features

San Jose, California-based video communications platform Zoom has acquired end-to-end encrypted chat and file-sharing platform provider Keybase. 

The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The Keybase team will help Zoom accelerate its plans to introduce end-to-end encryption to the platform, according to a statement.

However, the end-to-end encrypted meetings will not support phone bridges, cloud recording or non-Zoom conference room systems, CEO Eric S Yuan said in a blog post. 

Additionally, Keybase co-founder and CEO Max Krohn will lead the security engineering team at Zoom and report directly to Yuan, the statement said.  

Also, the companies will jointly determine the future of New York headquartered Keybase’s products, it said. 

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The Zoom platform will have easily deployable security features and be enterprise-grade scalable, Yuan said.

“We believe that no current platform offers all of these features. This is what Zoom plans to build, giving our users security, ease of use and scale, all at once,” Yuan said.

Zoom has been under fire for security issues since the beginning of the year, and the complaints have only gone up as the popularity of video conferencing platforms increase amid the Covid-19 lockdown.  

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On April 1, it announced a 90-day initiative to address privacy and security problems on the platform.

On April 27, it rolled out the Zoom 5.0 update, which addressed concerns such as zoombombing and introduced an upgraded standard encryption.