MoQ-Secure Encryption & Signing

A fixed format for end-to-end secure media payloads carried by Media over QUIC (MoQ).

Encryption algorithms:

• ChaCha20-Poly1305
• AES-256-GCM (added from v0.1.4)

Signature algorithm:

• Ed25519

Payload-Only Encryption: MoQ is a content-agnostic transport format. MoQ-Secure encrypts only the frame’s media payload bytes. Transport framing and routing remain unchanged. Metadata such as broadcast name, media codec and resolution remains unencrypted and visible to the relay.

Purpose

People increasingly want to protect their communications from pervasive monitoring and mass surveillance. At the same time, audiences need confidence that media is genuine: in an era of deepfakes, you often can’t tell whether a video or audio clip truly came from the person it claims to be.

MoQ-Secure is designed to provide:

• Privacy for the media payload - so content can’t be inspected in transit
• Integrity - so tampering is detected
• Authenticity - so frames can be verified as coming from a particular publisher
• Flexibility - balancing security and performance

Publishers are able to use any public MOQ CDN, with the hosting provider unable to see the content. Consumers can verify the publisher of the content, wherever they receive it from.

A moq-secure frame is nested entirely within the payload of a moq frame.