A team of former Signal developers, working with researchers at Microsoft and Harvard University, has released Encrypted Spaces — free, open-source software that lets collaborative applications keep your data secret while making sure everyone can verify that changes actually happened. The project was announced in June 2026.

Here is the basic idea: most apps you use to share documents or work as a team keep your data in an unencrypted form on their servers. Those servers control everything and see all your information. Encrypted Spaces does something different. It encrypts your data and structures how changes are made so that you and other participants can mathematically verify that what happened in your shared space actually happened — without needing to trust the company running the service.

The Problem It Solves

When you use Google Docs, Slack, or similar tools, the company's server holds all your data in readable form. It decides who can see what, it settles disputes when two people edit at the same time, and it keeps the history of everything that happened. If a hacker breaks in or a government forces the company to turn over data, your information is exposed.

Encrypted Spaces is designed to fix this. Instead of the server being the trusted authority, the math is. Every change to your shared documents or workspace is recorded in a way that any participant can independently check. You no longer have to hope the company is secure or trustworthy. You can verify the truth yourself.

This is not an entirely new idea — researchers have been working on these kinds of systems for years. What makes this version interesting is that it tries to combine these research ideas into something practical that software developers can actually build with, not just something that exists only as a research paper.

Who Built It and What Happens Now

Signal is the encrypted messaging app that privacy advocates trust. The former developers who built Signal understand how to make encryption work in the real world — fast, without making people's phones drain their batteries or creating nightmare scenarios for managing encryption keys. Microsoft Research brings deep expertise in cryptography, and Harvard brings academic credibility. Together, they are unusual.

Right now, Encrypted Spaces is still new. The cryptographic math inside it has not yet been tested and reviewed by many independent security researchers. Building encrypted systems that are both secure and practical is hard. Many systems work in theory but turn out to be exploitable in practice, or they are so slow that nobody uses them. The open-source release means security experts and developers can now pick it apart and decide if it really works.

For doctors, lawyers, accountants, and government workers who handle sensitive information and need to collaborate securely, this could matter. They already use various security tools to reduce risk, but protecting shared collaborative work while keeping it encrypted has remained one of the hardest unsolved problems. If Encrypted Spaces works, it would help them collaborate safely.

You can explore the project at encryptedspaces.org. All the source code is published openly so anyone can review it, study it, or build on it.