Before his untimely death in January, hacktivist Aaron Swartz was working on an open source dead-drop tool that would enable journalists to securely accept documents from whistleblowers without exposing their identities. Continuing his legacy, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has recently taken over the project in an effort to solve the technical issues that have deterred news organizations from adopting the tool.

As part of the initiative, the group hired cybersecurity expert James Dolan to maintain the code and provide comprehensive technical support for users. Dubbed SecureDrop, the software is billed as the safest tool for communicating with anonymous sources.

While the open source community is working to fill the gaps in online security, cryptography researchers Kenneth White and Matthew Green are taking a closer look at the foundations of the data protection space. The pair recently launched a fundraiser to raise money for a full audit of TrueCrypt, a popular disk encryption app that has been downloaded more than 28 million times since it became available in 2004.

Not only has TrueCrypt never been audited before, but its authors remain anonymous to this very day. Add to that the fact that binary releases account for the overwhelming majority of downloads, and it’s not hard to see why the two researchers are keen on having the software examined. Donors have pledged nearly $48,000 to the campaign at the time of writing.

Not to be outdone, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is offering two millions dollars to whoever designs a “fully automated cyber defense system” that can find and fix vulnerabilities in source code. DARPA has also challenges developers to create a “check engine” that would enable software to scan itself for zero day exploits.