Show HN: We made metadata-secure video conferencing that's easy to use
Hi, we&#x27;re Barath and Paul. With our small and awesome team we built Booth to provide the kind of security in video conferencing that we always wanted but was never available: where the server doesn&#x27;t learn anything about either the participants or their conversation, and it just works like normal in a browser.<p>The problem is that we&#x27;re all using video conferencing every day, and what used to be conversations within the four walls of conference rooms are now happening on various video conferencing services. They learn a ton of metadata and data about the who, what, when, and how of every conversation. And when they get breached or have an insider leak, there&#x27;s valuable information at the end of the line that shouldn&#x27;t be there in the first place.<p>Our solution uses a classic idea we call the Decoupling Principle. The idea is to provide privacy and security online by splitting information architecturally and organizationally. That means two-party privacy for a service like Booth (in the current beta version of Booth, split between us and Fastly) and for functions like authentication and connectivity to be separated. (We wrote a paper on the Decoupling Principle with our collaborators at Fastly and Cloudflare that&#x27;ll be published in a couple of weeks.)<p>Booth uses our Multi-Party Relay (MPR) (that lives alongside &#x2F; separate from Booth), which is similar to Apple&#x27;s iCloud Private Relay. So the traffic between you and the video chat server goes through the MPR. To the server, a meeting looks like it&#x27;s between a bunch of Relay server IPs. In Booth, the video and audio is end-to-end encrypted using Insertable Streams (an emerging WebRTC standard that is currently supported in chromium-based browsers). We also prevent local address leakage that normally happens in WebRTC ICE negotiation. We built Booth on top of the excellent Livekit project, which in turn is based upon Pion.<p>You should be able to use Booth like you use other web-based video conferencing today -- create a meeting, share the link. Right now we haven&#x27;t restricted the free offering, though eventually for capacity reasons we plan to. We have an enterprise offering with additional functionality that&#x27;s in closed testing.<p>Ultimately our goal is to add metadata security to the Internet – to all sorts of services that are out there. We&#x27;d love to work with anyone who&#x27;d like to add metadata security to what they provide today. Thanks!