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 where there’s really no reason not to build end-to-end encryption into these sorts of collaborative apps from the base layer. Zero-knowledge proofs, which are a broader technology also central to privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash, are used to allow a central server to keep each end user updated on the latest version of a document or other area of collaboration without the server ever having access to unencrypted data.
Along with their base architecture software, the Encrypted Spaces team also released a demo app, simply called Spaces, on Thursday.
Doesn’t Proton Already Offer This?
Of course, it should be noted that various options for E2EE collaboration apps already exist. For example, Proton has its own suite of workspace and productivity apps that can be viewed as encrypted alternatives to equivalents offered by Google. There’s also the blockchain-based, Web3-type system called Fileverse, which has options for documents and spreadsheets. CryptPad even offers an E2EE version of Trello. Signal itself also has group chats at this point, and Encrypted Spaces is reported to have originated from that expanded development for the messaging app.
However, Green still sees value in what Encrypted Spaces offers, as it’s more of a reusable platform aimed at developers rather than end users. “I like the idea that we’re going to have a standard library for this that a lot of people can review,” he told Wired. “And if you use this library, you inherit all the security for free.”
Governments Aren’t Going to Like This
While it’s still early days for Encrypted Spaces, one thing is already known for sure: A project like this is likely to stoke the flames of long-running debates over encryption that have repeatedly put app developers and governments at odds. Just last week, Signal President Meredith Whittaker reiterated that the company would leave the United Kingdom rather than comply with measures she views as undermining encryption and user privacy.
Signal President Meredith Whittaker threatens again to pull the encrypted messaging app out of the UK
She tells @MishalHusain why Keir Starmer's approach to phone screening could usher in "mass surveillance" https://t.co/TKxYzfhu7O pic.twitter.com/CEcLK2dB2R
— Bloomberg (@business) June 10, 2026
There is a long history of governments’ general uneasiness with any sort of E2EE being made available to the general public going all the way back to the Crypto Wars of the 90s and ridiculous proposals of the time such as the infamous Clipper Chip. The recent situation in the UK indicates that this uneasiness with the democratization of technology is unlikely to subside anytime soon. Additionally, the U.S. export-control directive forcing Anthropic to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals echoes the way strong encryption was once treated as a controlled export during the Crypto Wars.
