How Your Data Is Encrypted

Encryption appears in three places, and they protect against three different things.

In transit

Everything between your browser and KamoUniverse is encrypted with TLS — the same technology as the padlock in your address bar. That covers anybody watching the network between you and us: a shared café connection, a compromised router, a curious network administrator.

Every hostname KamoUniverse serves has its own certificate, including white-label domains. If your organization has its own branded address, that address has a real certificate of its own, not a shared one that produces a browser warning.

Traffic between KamoUniverse's own services, inside the cluster, is also encrypted. That matters because "inside the network" has stopped being a meaningful description of "safe".

At rest

Stored data is encrypted on disk. If somebody physically removed a drive, they would have an encrypted drive.

Some data goes further and is encrypted individually, with a key held separately from the data. Notes are the clearest example: a note's body is encrypted before it's stored, so it isn't readable from the database even by somebody who can read the database.

End to end, in meetings

Kamo Meets can encrypt a video call end to end, meaning the video is encrypted in each participant's browser and decrypted only in the others' — the server carries it without being able to see it.

There's an honest trade-off. Anything that requires the server to see the video stops working, recording included. That isn't a limitation to be worked around; it's what "end to end" means. End-to-End Encryption in Kamo Meets covers the choice.

What encryption doesn't protect against

Somebody signing in as you. Encryption protects data from people who shouldn't have access to the system; it does nothing about someone using credentials they shouldn't have. Strong passwords, prompt removal of people who leave, and the access controls under Security and Access are what cover that.