Monthly Rust Meetup

## Details

Join us for the new and improved monthly Cambridge Rust meetup, hosted at Quantinuum's office on Hill's Road.

Speaker: Daniel Hugenroth

Topic: In an era where governments have the ability to eavesdrop on journalists and their sources through mass surveillance infrastructure, a team at The University of Cambridge and The Guardian developed the CoverDrop system, and its implementation SecureMessaging, to provide a secure, anonymous, and easy-to-use initial contact mechanism. This presentation will detail how Rust language features were instrumental in building the system’s secure and performant backend services and how we made an inherently opaque system observable. Finally, I will highlight some open challenges when building secure systems using Rust in practice.

CoverDrop website with white paper: https://www.coverdrop.org/

Speaker Bio:

Dr Daniel Hugenroth (https://www.danielhugenroth.com) is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge. His research interests revolve around cryptographic protocols, anonymous communication, usable security, and mobile devices. For the last five years he dedicated his time and work to the CoverDrop project (https://www.coverdrop.org/). He co-authored the foundational paper, published in 2022, and then collaborated with The Guardian over three years to bring the system to life—culminating in the launch of SecureMessaging in June 2025. Daniel has recently co-founded Light Squares (https://lightsquares.dev).

Personal website: https://www.danielhugenroth.com (with links to BlueSky & LinkedIn)

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Agenda
18:45 - Doors Open
19:15 - Talk
19:45 - Networking and Pizza
20:30 - Pub (Devonshire Arms)

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Getting there
The event is hosted at Quantinuum's office in Terrington House, we will let people in periodically but if you don't see anyone please buzz at the front door of the building.

We are a 10-15 minute walk from Cambridge central station and there is bike parking in the basement of the building.

If driving to the event there is free parking after 5pm on St Paul's road next to the venue.

Unfortunately the lift is out of service, so there is no accessible entrance to the venue.

Food & Drinks Sponsored by Chaser Systems
Check them out at https://chasersystems.com/

Photos may be taken during the event for social media and community promotion. Let us know if you'd prefer not to appear in any pictures!