Participant and Channel Privacy in End-to-End Encrypted VoIP Teleconferencing
Abstract
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) chat services such as Discord allow organizations, teams, and friends to easily connect to one another with voice teleconferencing and text chat. However, most VoIP traffic is either unencrypted or encrypted only in transit. Our research implements a teleconferencing application with a conversation model similar to Discord that not only features full end-to-end encryption, but also hides conversation metadata. Obscuring this metadata is important because in many cases, the contents of a given conversation matter less than the fact that a conversation occurred between two or more parties. Therefore, we seek to protect this data. Our implementation is a command-line Python application that allows for multiple channels, or independent conference calls, facilitated by a single instance of the server program. Our protocol utilizes a homomorphic encryption scheme to allow the cloud server to mix audio signals without knowing the contents of those signals or which channel a given user is in. This prevents an untrusted server from tracking who talks to one another, when they speak, and what is being said. We presume an honest-but-curious server model and utilize the Microsoft SEAL homomorphic encryption library.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 16, 2022
- Accession Number
- AD1171857
Entities
People
- Samuel P. Laney
Organizations
- United States Naval Academy