KDE's Kaidan Messaging App Plans for Encrypted Audio and Video Calls

Kaidan XMPP messaging app plans for audio and video calls with end-to-end encryption.

Audio and Video calls in Kaidan

The Kaidan team announced a few days back that they plan to implement encrypted audio, video calls and some associated features. Kaidan will receive a financial grant from NLnet of Europe for this work.

The primary driving factor of this development is the demand. Recently, many XMPP protocol chat apps introduced audio and video calling. The users are moving away from chat to calls for ease of communication and other benefits in XMPP.

Recently, the XMPP protocol allows audio and video calls to be implemented in various clients and cloud services. Hence, this move is an important one.

“Kaidan’s goal is to establish free and secure communication while being easy to use, thus lowering the entry barrier to XMPP for average users from other networks. NLnet and a couple of other organizations support us via the NGI Zero PET fund to achieve that. The money is provided by the European Commission. That is an example of how software can be developed according to the Public Money, Public Code initiative.”
Kaidan Team

Implementation

Initially, the team is planning to utilize the grant by implementing group and incoming calls. And slowly move into more complex call features. The reason is a complex one.

The authentication and authorization of this implementation are handled by XMPP’s OMEMO encryption which provides end-to-end encryption for chats and calls. Hence, the team must work on complex use cases such as calls “to and from” non-Kaidan XMPP clients.

As of publishing this, the implementation is open as a Feature Request in GitLab. You may want to follow this to update and develop this nifty feature.

Via Kaidan blog.

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