Signal Vets Push to Encrypt Slack, Google Docs, and More

A team of engineers, including the co-creator of the Signal protocol along with contributors from Microsoft and Harvard, is developing open-source software designed to extend the hardened end-to-end encryption (E2EE) found in Signal to collaborative platforms like Slack, Google Docs, and Discord. The initiative, called Encrypted Spaces, is currently in a “Research Preview” phase, but its code is already available on GitHub.

The project’s website frames the effort as a response to growing risks of data exposure, loss of control, and self-censorship tied to reliance on 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 site states.

Rather than creating a new set of consumer apps, Encrypted Spaces functions as infrastructure for developers to build their own encrypted applications. “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. Johns Hopkins Computer Science Professor Matt Green added, “You can think of it as the Signal protocol for collaboration apps.”

On X, Anthony Ronning, CTO of privacy-focused AI startup Maple, described Encrypted Spaces as “Verifiable, encrypted, untrusted storage.”

The core idea is to abstract away the complexities of cryptography, creating a platform where building E2EE into collaborative apps from the ground up becomes the obvious default. The system leverages zero-knowledge proofs, a technology also central to the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash. This allows a central server to keep users updated on the latest version of a document or workspace without ever accessing unencrypted data.

Alongside the core architecture, the team also released a demo app called Spaces on Thursday.

Doesn’t Proton Already Offer This?

It’s true that several E2EE collaboration tools already exist. Proton offers encrypted alternatives to Google’s productivity suite, Fileverse provides blockchain-based document and spreadsheet options, and CryptPad even has an E2EE version of Trello. Signal itself now supports group chats, and Encrypted Spaces reportedly grew out of that development work.

Still, Green sees unique value in the project because it’s a reusable platform aimed at developers, not 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

Though Encrypted Spaces is still early-stage, one thing is certain: it will reignite the long-running conflict between encryption advocates and governments. Just last week, Signal President Meredith Whittaker reiterated that the company would leave the United Kingdom rather than comply with measures she believes undermine encryption and user privacy.

This tension is nothing new. Government resistance to widespread E2EE dates back to the Crypto Wars of the 1990s and proposals like the infamous Clipper Chip. The UK’s recent stance suggests this discomfort with democratized encryption technology will persist. Similarly, the U. S. export-control directive that forced Anthropic to restrict access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals mirrors the way strong encryption was once treated as a controlled export during the Crypto Wars.