Unique sharing security: video verification

Nextcloud features a unique and extremely powerful security feature you can use to give your shares the ultimate protection: video verification.

When you need ultimate protection

Imagine you need to share very sensitive data to somebody. Say it is the result of a medical test, or important financial data. You want to make sure nobody else than the intended recipient can gain access to this data. You could send a link with the files, protected with a password. Sending the password separately means a third party trying to intercept the communication will have a hard time catching both the link and the password. However, often both still arrive on the same mobile phone. Moreover, it is not that uncommon that more than one person have access to that device: a spouse, or kid, for example.

Video Verification

Video Verification is a very powerful and innovative way to verify the identity of the person you share with before you hand them over the password for the share. Rather than emailing or sending the password over chat, the recipient of the share has to use a video call to request the password from you. This eliminates the risk that a spouse, kid or hacker who has access to their email or mobile device has a chance to see the data. That call can come in through the mobile apps for Talk, making it easy for the sender to pick up.

How to use it

To enable the additional protection afforded by Video Verification, create a shared link and set a password. Then, when you go to the share menu again, you can enable the ‘Password protect by Talk’ option which enables video verification. Note that this feature requires your server to have Talk installed! The recipient of the share will have to have a webcam and microphone so the sender can see and hear who is requesting access to the data. There is a great tutorial on Techrepublic about using video verification! The video below shows fully how Video Verification works.