New enhanced privacy for cloud collaboration developed by Irish researchers

The InvizCrypt platform, developed at Trinity, is designed so users can collaborate on sensitive documents without the platform provider being able to read the content.

The global cloud productivity market exceeds $50 billion annually, for healthcare, legal, financial, and public-sector organisations, underlining the potential significance of this innovation. Researchers at Trinity College Dublin have developed a new cloud collaboration platform (InvizCrypt) that offers true privacy, giving users much stronger control over who can access their sensitive data and documents

Better privacy for cloud collaboration developed

The InvizCrypt platform, developed by Professor Hitesh Tewari and colleagues from Trinity’s School of Computer Science and Statistics and ADAPT at Trinity College Dublin, is designed to allow users to collaborate on sensitive documents while preventing the platform provider from reading the content.

The project comes amid growing European concern about data privacy, security, digital sovereignty and foreign legal access to sensitive information held by large technology providers.  In April 2026, the European Commission advanced a sovereign cloud procurement framework that will allow EU institutions, bodies and agencies to procure up to €180 million in sovereign cloud services over six years. France has also moved to replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with its own sovereign video conferencing platform, Visio, across government departments by 2027.

Speaking about InvizCrypt, Professor Hitesh Tewari, said: “Users place huge trust in cloud platforms to store and process their data, but many people do not realise that, in conventional systems, the provider can technically still access document content. That creates risks around privacy, security and legal disclosure, regardless of where data is hosted. InvizCrypt is designed to offer a fully private model that can not only support real-time collaboration but also ensure the security of the data within the documents.”

What are the potential impacts of this research?

Most cloud collaboration platforms are built on a model where the provider can technically access the contents of a document as part of delivering the service. The InvizCrypt system is designed differently. Before a document leaves the user’s own device, it is encrypted into unreadable data. The cloud platform can still store the file, allow collaboration between users, and keep the document in sync, but it cannot see what the document says. Only approved collaborators hold the keys needed to read it.

This fundamental difference means that documents, attached files and real-time edits are protected before they reach the platform. For users, InvizCrypt feels like ordinary cloud collaboration but with the added layer of security.

Prof. Tewari said: “The first users of InvizCrypt will be researchers because research teams often work on highly sensitive material before publication and collaborations often require close contact despite individuals being situated around the globe.”

“This information can be valuable to competitors, cyber criminals, or even foreign state-backed actors. Universities are increasingly being warned that research data and intellectual property are attractive targets, and even retaining total privacy from the eyes of governments — foreign and domestic — is something many researchers highly value in today’s world.”

The team has started with LaTeX, a writing system used by many researchers, scientists, engineers and mathematicians to prepare complex academic papers and technical documents.  Following this first phase, the technology will then be extended into secure document editing and spreadsheet workflows for organisations that need to collaborate without exposing sensitive content to platform providers.

By beginning with an encrypted collaborative LaTeX editor, InvizCrypt targets a community that already depends on cloud-based collaboration but has limited options for keeping sensitive work private from the platform provider. This initial phase will allow the team to validate the system in real research workflows, build trust with universities and research institutions, and establish the institutional relationships needed for wider adoption.

The team will then extend the same server-blind architecture beyond LaTeX into secure document editing and spreadsheet workflows, creating a broader privacy-first platform for a range of users and domains later in 2026.

About ADAPT

ADAPT is the world-leading Research Ireland Centre for AI Driven Digital Content Technology hosted by Trinity College Dublin. ADAPT’s partner institutions include Dublin City University, University College Dublin, Technological University Dublin, Maynooth University, Munster Technological University, Technological University of the Shannon, and University of Galway. ADAPT’s research vision is to pioneer new forms of proactive, scalable, and integrated AI-driven Digital Content Technology that empower individuals and society to engage in digital experiences with control, inclusion, and accountability with the long term goal of a balanced digital society by 2030. ADAPT is pioneering new Human Centric AI techniques and technologies including personalisation, natural language processing, data analytics, intelligent machine and translation human-computer interaction, as well as setting the standards for data governance, privacy and ethics for digital content. www.adaptcentre.ie

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