E2EE with agents

Overview

A LiveKit agent is just another participant in the room, so it needs the shared encryption key to publish and subscribe to encrypted media. The same key encrypts the agent's outbound audio (such as TTS) and decrypts inbound media from clients (such as user speech for STT). Pass an E2EEOptions to ctx.connect inside your job entrypoint, using the same shared key the clients use.

See Key distribution for guidance on delivering the shared key to your agent and clients securely.

Enable E2EE in your agent

Connect to the room with ctx.connect before starting your AgentSession. If you let AgentSession.start connect for you, there's no place to pass encryption options.

import os

from livekit import rtc
from livekit.agents import JobContext, AgentSession

@server.rtc_session(agent_name="my-agent")
async def entrypoint(ctx: JobContext):
    # Connect with E2EE before starting the session
    await ctx.connect(
        encryption=rtc.E2EEOptions(
            key_provider_options=rtc.KeyProviderOptions(
                shared_key=os.environ["LIVEKIT_E2EE_KEY"].encode(),
            ),
        ),
    )

    session = AgentSession(
        # ... configure your session ...
    )
    await session.start(agent=MyAgent(), room=ctx.room)

import { JobContext, defineAgent, voice } from '@livekit/agents';
import type { E2EEOptions } from '@livekit/rtc-node';

export default defineAgent({
  entry: async (ctx: JobContext) => {
    const e2ee: E2EEOptions = {
      keyProviderOptions: {
        sharedKey: new TextEncoder().encode(process.env.LIVEKIT_E2EE_KEY!),
      },
    };

    // Connect with E2EE before starting the session
    await ctx.connect(e2ee);

    const session = new voice.AgentSession({ /* ... configure your session ... */ });
    await session.start({ agent: new MyAgent(), room: ctx.room });
  },
});

Distributing the key to your agent

Treat the shared key like any other secret. Common patterns:

• Load it from an environment variable or secret manager at worker startup.
• Pass it through job metadata when dispatching the agent, so different rooms can use different keys.
• Don't hardcode keys in source.

Per-participant keys and key rotation

This page only covers the shared-key case. If your application requires unique keys per participant or key rotation during a room's lifetime, you'll need a custom key provider. See Using a custom key provider for details.

Examples

E2EE agent example

A minimal Python agent that connects to a room with end-to-end encryption using a shared key.