Applied Social Media Lab Launches Encrypted Spaces
Microsoft collaboration offers encrypted collaboration across platforms
June 11, 2026, CAMBRIDGE – The Applied Social Media Lab (ASML) at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is pleased to announce the release of Encrypted Spaces, a new project developed in close collaboration with the Cryptography Group at Microsoft Research and independent researchers. Nearly all modern collaborative applications (e.g., document editors, messaging apps, calendars, shared drives, and databases) rely on centralized servers that store and mediate shared state in plaintext (or encrypted forms that servers can decrypt). As a result, sensitive user information is vulnerable to exposure via data breaches, legal compulsion, and operator misuse.
End-to-end encryption is now standard for messaging, but has not generalized to support the complex, multi-user data formats that other collaborative applications require. Existing technical approaches for private collaboration (e.g., hardware enclaves, multiparty computation, and verifiable databases) individually address only part of the secure collaboration problem. Today, the Encrypted Spaces project is releasing a technical whitepaper and an open-source prototype for a system that closes the gaps.
An encrypted space is a cloud-based storage backend for building collaborative applications. User information in an encrypted space is encrypted with keys that servers do not know; those keys evolve as membership changes, providing forward secrecy, post-member-removal security, and scalable retention without re-encrypting stored data. Furthermore, every server operation is cryptographically verifiable by users. To support verification, an encrypted space pairs the encrypted database with an authenticated append-only history. Servers store data and synchronize user access to that data, but servers must also generate proofs while doing so; those proofs allow a user client to efficiently verify that servers (and other group members) are properly handling data.
An encrypted space is extensible: developers can define custom data operations and access control rules, with the encrypted space’s proof system being flexible enough to provide security guarantees for the developer-created functionality. Developers interact with the encrypted space using familiar, high-level abstractions like tables, files, and key/value stores, with the encrypted space’s SDK handling the low-level details of encryption, key management, data synchronization, and proof generation.
As ASML Principal Investigator James Mickens explained of the challenge Encrypted Spaces seeks to address,
Users store a huge amount of private data online, but keeping that data safe is incredibly hard, especially when it's stored on servers that users don't trust. The Encrypted Spaces work is a great piece of cryptographic research, but it's also a great piece of practical engineering that enables the benefits of cloud-based services (e.g., always-available data and cross-device synching) without forcing users to reveal sensitive information to people outside of trusted groups.
Encrypted Spaces is an active research effort developed in close collaboration with Microsoft Research’s Cryptography and Security group, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and independent researchers. At Harvard, the Encrypted Spaces project is supported by the Applied Social Media Lab at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; the ASML Principal Investigator is Professor James Mickens and the ASML Director is Meg Marco. The core team is Nora Trapp (ASML), Greg Zaverucha (Microsoft Research), Trevor Perrin (independent), and Michele Orrù (CNRS).
For press inquiries, please contact BKC’s Director of Communications and Engagement, Isabella Roden, at iroden@cyber.harvard.edu.
The Berkman Klein Center’s Applied Social Media Lab is supported by a generous gift from Frank H. McCourt, Jr. and the 501(c)(3) non-profit Project Liberty Institute.
