DAVE is Discord’s approach for adding end-to-end protection to real-time voice and video sessions. It is designed to encrypt media on the sender’s device and decrypt it only on the intended participants’ devices, using modern group key handling with MLS-style concepts. For multiparty calls, that matters because real-time media must stay low latency while still keeping content private.
In cyber security, DAVE raises the cost of interception by reducing what Discord’s servers can read from supported calls. It also introduces operational requirements: only updated, supported clients can participate, verification is needed to confirm a call is truly protected, and endpoint security remains critical because compromised devices can expose media after decryption. In practice, defenders look for these trust cues and keep clients patched, while attackers may target accounts or endpoints instead of the encrypted transport itself.