The problem it addresses
Most enterprise video platforms are encrypted in transit and at rest, which sounds comprehensive until someone asks the question that actually matters: can the vendor decrypt the meeting? For the majority of platforms, the honest answer is yes — and for organisations in defence, healthcare, legal and finance, that answer is increasingly one they have to justify to a regulator rather than to a procurement team.
NorthStar starts from the opposite default. Media is encrypted by the participants, and the infrastructure that routes it is not in a position to read it. When the legal team asks what happens if the platform receives a subpoena, the answer is a property of the architecture rather than a promise in a contract.
What makes it different
- The server routes; it does not decrypt. Confidentiality is a structural property, not a policy. Removing the vendor from the trust equation is the entire point of the product.
- It runs in a browser. No client to deploy, no agent to get approved, no mobile device management programme. For an organisation that needs to bring outside counsel or an external auditor into a call, that difference decides whether a secure platform is used at all.
- Built on open, published standards. The cryptographic foundations are public IETF work rather than a proprietary scheme, which means the design can be reviewed by someone who does not work for us. We are also contributing back to the standards process in this area.
- Designed for the compliance conversation. The awkward questions — who can access what, under which circumstances, and how would anyone know — are treated as first-class design inputs rather than as documentation written after the architecture is frozen.
Where it actually stands
NorthStar is a pilot, in front of design partners. It is not an enterprise-grade product yet, and we would rather say so here than have a prospect discover it.
Verified today: encrypted two-party calling between browsers on desktop and mobile, with screen sharing encrypted on the same terms as camera and microphone, running on a containerised, TLS-terminated deployment with an operator runbook behind it.
Not yet verified: multi-party calling. Group sessions work as an interface, but the group key handling is not yet proven correct for participants joining and leaving mid-call, so we do not present multi-party as secure and are not asking anyone to rely on it. It is the current engineering priority. Longer-dated work — hardware-isolated infrastructure and the full compliance surface — is planned and scoped rather than delivered.
We are engaging a small number of design partners in regulated sectors who want to shape the product against their own compliance obligations. If that is you, the conversation is a genuine one, not a disguised sales call.
Talk to us about
Secure real-time communications, applied cryptography in production systems, privacy-preserving architecture, or building a platform that has to satisfy a regulator rather than merely a security questionnaire.