| > WebRTC is encrypted generally even if you leak metadata like IP address. Yes, WebRTC does end-to-end encryption by default. The IP is "leaked" because the peers directly connect to one another, so they will naturally require each others' IP address (which is required to talk to one another). There are both upsides and downsides to direct P2P connections. 1. Pro: The minimal number of parties can analyze the call. 2. Pro: The call depends on a minimal number of parties. 3. Pro: The call is generally more performant, limited only by the connection between both peers. 4. Pro: No need for third-party services other than a network connection. 5. Con: The peer learns your IP which may be used to help identify you or DoS your internet connection. 6. Con: Intermediates anywhere on the network can see which two peers are talking. (With a SFU only the SFU knows the ends of the connection for sure) > Is Cloudflare stating they will be the middleman and therefore have access to the decrypted video stream? I see nothing in this article that suggests that they will have access to the decrypted video. However I wouldn't be surprised if that is added in the future. The reason is that in order to to big calls you need to support multi-quality streams. This can in theory be done on decrypted connections but not all browsers support this right now (notably Firefox). So if you want the widest support you need to do video transcoding at the SFU. There are also other features such as recording and live-streaming that (generally) require access to the raw video. (Of course this can be done as adding the recorder/streamer as a "peer" to the E2EE call when needed, but that is still giving the keys to the company at this point). |
It definitely used to be true that most p2p routes were lower latency than bouncing through a server at, say, an AWS data center. In 2019 we looked closely at this and it was fairly rare to see cases where latency was improved by switching over from a p2p connection to an SFU (media server) connection. Now, the reverse is true. It's usually the case that routing through a media server at AWS (or any other major provider) is as good or better than a p2p route between any two end users.
Early in the pandemic, we assumed this was a temporary thing. ISPs had not built out their networks expecting much upstream traffic. But they'd adjust.
well, ISPs have evolved. Now we see much better performance in general than we did early in the pandemic. But we still see better performance to "the backbone" than we do between ISPs.
Another step in the Internet become less of a decentralized network, perhaps.