Signal Veterans Want to Encrypt Slack, Google Docs, and Basically Every Other App
Signal Veterans Want to Encrypt Slack, Google Docs, and Basically Every Other App
Publish Date: 2026-06-14 15:54:00
Source Domain: gizmodo.com
A team of developers, including the co-creator of the Signal protocol and contributors from Microsoft and Harvard, are building out open-source software that can help bring the sort of hardened privacy and security offered via Signal’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to more collaborative types of apps, such as Slack, Google Docs, and Discord. The project is known as Encrypted Spaces, and although it is currently described as being in a “Research Preview” phase, code already exists on GitHub.
The project’s website describes the software as an attempt to push back against risks associated with exposure, loss of control, and self-censorship that have grown through the increased use of highly-trusted, centralized cloud services. “For journalists, activists, patients, and social-service organizations, these risks are not theoretical—they shape what can safely be said, shared, or built,” the website notes.
A new research effort called Encrypted Spaces explores an architecture for collaborative applications where data is encrypted, and operations are cryptographically verifiable. Learn more: https://t.co/t7qkE27Xdh
— Microsoft Research (@MSFTResearch) June 11, 2026
Rather than producing a suite of individual apps, the project is built as infrastructure for developers to create encrypted apps of their own. “We want to provide the technological surface area for developers to build all these apps in a privacy-preserving way,” Nora Trapp, an engineer at Harvard’s Applied Social Media Lab and former technical lead at the Signal Foundation, told Wired. “You can think of it as the Signal protocol for collaboration apps,” Johns Hopkins Computer Science Professor Matt Green added.
Elsewhere on X, Anthony Ronning, who is the CTO of privacy-focused AI startup Maple, described Encrypted Spaces as “Verifiable, encrypted, untrusted storage.”
The idea is to take the complexities of cryptography out of the equation and create a platform…
