Former Signal developers and cryptographers from the Cryptography Group at Microsoft Research and the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society announced an active research project for “Encrypted Spaces” today:
In this paper, we introduce [encrypted spaces], a new storage architecture that layers secure collaboration protocols atop untrusted servers. To developers, an encrypted space looks like a sync engine […] with built-in support for group management. Behind the scenes, the space automatically implements cryptographic protocols to encrypt data, manage keys and users, and verify the authenticity and integrity of the data. Our architecture aims to be flexible enough to support common collaborative applications such as shared drives and documents, calendars, spreadsheets, source code control, artistic and engineering design applications, and chat forums.
Unlike Signal, however, the code that the Encrypted Spaces group has released is, for now, not a single, ready-for-use application. Instead, it’s a code repository that the group is inviting cryptography researchers and developers to review, with the goal of eventually allowing coders to build their own encrypted collaborative apps—but without needing any cryptography knowledge.