SecureDrop software engineer Cory Myers and ETH Zurich researcher Felix Linker gave a talk entitled “SecureDrop — From Design to Analysis” to the Usable Formal Methods Research Group at the 124th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in Montreal on Nov. 4, 2025.

The SecureDrop Protocol is a custom messaging protocol we’re developing to make the next generation of SecureDrop encrypted end to end, like encrypted messaging apps such as Signal. Since we announced this project last year, we’ve been working with researchers at ETH Zurich to model the protocol and prove its security.

This talk explains the motivations of the SecureDrop Protocol and the origins of this collaboration, which grew out of a workshop Linker presented two years ago at IETF 118 in Prague. The presentation also previews improvements we’ve already made in the design, along with findings we hope to formally publish soon.

We’d like to thank Felix Linker, Luca Maier, Kenneth G. Paterson, and Shannon Veitch at ETH Zurich for their time, expertise, and contributions throughout this project.