LevelUp

Announcing an advanced curricula for trainers on cure cryptographic concepts

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The tools and practices of digital safety stands on top of a relatively small amount of core cryptographic concepts. Yet in training on these tools and practices, we treat the cryptography as magic that we just trust inherently, or provide an often convoluted metaphor to partially explain, and move on.

Of course, not everyone needs to understand how hashes are really working, or what an HTTPS connection, S/MIME, and a PGP key pair have in common.

But for those of us who shoulder the responsibility of training others on digital safety, however, it is critical we make an effort to more deeply understand these concepts, and understand where our knowledge thins out and stops, so that we can be honest with ourselves and those we support when we get complex questions.

We also do ourselves a disservice by presuming these concepts are inherently “hard.” Which is also not to imply this is easy – picking up a guide and working through it in a day or two will not prepare you to implement secure cryptographic algorithms (please don’t!).

However, exploring these concepts over the course of a few days will give you eternally useful insights into every technical aspect of digital safety. A baseline understanding of asymmetric RSA encryption gives deep insights into PGP key pairs, HTTPS connections, and even S/MIME encryption, as well as helping you evaluate new encryption tools. Understanding “entropy” opens the door to answering challenging questions about real-world password security. Understanding “hashes” not only supports how validation of media and downloads works, but also builds on how PGP signatures work, HTTPS certificates, and gives you a valuable tool for all sorts of uses.

Find lessons on Asymmetric encryption, entropy, and hashes in the new Fundamentals of Cryptography section.

Learning Goals

Reduce inaccurate understanding of critical security concepts
Introduce fundamental cryptographic concepts to digital safety trainers and interested learners
Enable better explanation of common topics in digital safety training beyond the curricula or metaphor used
Dispel the myth that any understanding of these concepts is impossible

Celebrating a decade of the LevelUp Community

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ten years ago, the LevelUp site relaunched as a community-owned site as its core funding wound down. For many projects, that would have been the likely end. Thanks to a steady stream of volunteer efforts, however, LevelUp continues to grow - both with updated content, improvements to its backend, new community members, and continued activity and engagement. To celebrate the decade of community support, we have re-launched the News and Updates section and filled in highlights of contributions from the community and to better track the next decade of LevelUp as a shared resource for digital safety trainers.

LevelUp Meetup at the Global Gathering

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Join a meetup of digital safety practitioners at the Global Gathering to discuss the role of core trainer curricula and practice in a world of limited resources but increasing needs. How can LU better support community-based and peer training models? We can be both introspective on current gaps and work to welcome new contributions.

Community Resource Refresh

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The digital safety landscape is constantly evolving, and alongside this, the community provides new, updated, and contextually refreshed guides, curricula, and training support materials. While Level Up is focused more on evergreen trainer support, these community resources are critical to the digital safety trainer ecosystem. In August 2024, we did a full refresh of linked content in the Community Resources and Tools section, including a spreadsheet tracking hundreds of resources by updated date and language localization, removing outdated content and adding new topics on things like tabletop exercises and hands-on engagements.

Moving Digital Safety Training Online

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Access Now Digital Security Helpline has been doing a lot of digital security training online, as surely also with many others in the digital safety trainer community. Through this experience, we have developed new ways to apply the ADIDS framework in online training engagements.

Although the pandemic lockdowns are now over and people are starting to travel and do in-person training again, we think that online training will continue to be relevant and practiced by many trainers and/or organizations. Based on this thought, we decided to develop documentation to collect our learning on the subject matter, and we imagine that this might be useful for other trainers as well.

In consultation with the awesome Cheekay, we created the following content for Level Up:

Using ADIDS for online digital security training
How to create safe space for online training, including an agenda template

Integrating the Security Education Companion

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is an update on the Level Up community’s efforts to better link content from the Security Education Companion into the LevelUp website. During our last meeting on the topic in October, we took some time to go through the LevelUp site and identify potential areas for cross-linkage with SEC.

Evan Summers’ (and others!) mapped and linked Security Education Companion resources to Level-Up content. You can see an example of these updates at: Be a Better Trainer and see all the changes in this pull request

This helps bring the two resources closer together and take full advantage of the training tools offered by the SEC.

Improvements to the Level Up backend

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

First off, thanks to everyone who joined the LevelUp call at RightsCon yesterday - some really great and actionable feedback came out of it, from a more welcoming github intro to a clearer “what and how content gets added” process.

In addition to those improvements, Tin Geber and Jon Camfield have made some signficant backend improvements to the site - removing the Travis CI dependency to focus on Github Actions, and significantly reducing build time (by 3190%). You might have also noticed additional minor tweaks to the site yesterday as well, including a “last commit” image in the footer to close a long-open issue.

Moving to Github Actions

no external VPS or CI needed anymore: our stack is reduced to 1 element, without losing functionality or features
the Actions .yaml is almost unchanged from default, so fairly easy to maintain
it’s a good bet that Github will keep our (super simple) workflow features free for a long time
if one day we want to migrate to Gitlab, Gitea, or another self-hosted repo, they usually have decent feature parity with Github Actions, so this will make the migration easier

Due to github hosting settings, this meant a few more changes to ensure the test and dev sites also work, and changing how we host the live site. It is now fully and only on github, and not also behind Deflect.ca. The Level Up Matomo statistics server will live on (via GreenHost), (and it can serve as a backup host if needed in a pinch).

One final note on stats, however - matomo is generally tracking over 10x hits LESS than the server-visible actual traffic, per Deflect’s stats (and this was also seen importing raw apache stats from the Very Old webserver years ago). This is likely because Level Up visitors block javascript/image-based statistics trackers (privacy training works!), whereas server logs capture all hits on the server. We lost these Deflect stats when we switched over, so I wanted to document this discrepancy in the community’s consciousness as a specific limitation of LevelUp stats, and a general limitation of using most analytics/tracking tools to track digisec practitioners.

Site theme cleanup

This work underscored how … well, unpleasant it is to update content even for those comfortable working with github and jekyll. Currently each minor change (even just a text change in one file) you make on a local machine takes 3 minutes on a powerful CPU, due to some of our theme choices - mainly highlighting the top navigation item for the section you’re in.

By removing that highlight logic and caching the navigation and footer (using https://github.com/benbalter/jekyll-include-cache), we can reduce build time down to 5 seconds - a 3190% improvement (!!). The “cache” is per-rebuild, so new content will still show up, but instead of custom-rebuilding the navigation and footer for every single page, it is built once and then re-used.

These are now live and preserve working breadcrumbs, and we have also been able to restore the highlighting without impacting the build times.

LevelUp at RightsCon 2022

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Following up quickly to share the details for next week’s RightsCon session where we hope to continue this conversation. The session will take place on June 9 from 2:45-3:45 PM ET and the title and description are below. Reminder that you must be registered for RightsCon in order to participate. Registration is open until June 3: www.rightscon.org/register-2022

Session Title: What’s next for LevelUp, a community-owned platform for global digital safety training resources?

Session Description: LevelUp (https://level-up.cc/) is a community-owned platform designed to gather resources for the global digital safety training community. The original content was compiled over 6 years ago, and while much of it is still useful, there are components that need to be updated. As the training space continues to evolve, so do the resources required to facilitate or implement digital safety support. While there are many interested parties who are willing to invest in the maintenance of this community resource, coordination has proven difficult in recent years. This community lab will bring together members of the Internet Freedom community who are passionate and knowledgeable about digital security education and training to develop a clear action plan for refining the LevelUp content. The session will focus on capturing (via online collaboration tools) feedback on the current content/format, mapping the specific skills/interest areas/availability of those interested in contributing, and begin the process of setting up a 6-month plan for implementing the most urgent updates (this process may require additional time and inputs from the community following the session).

Log into the official RightsCon platform for full details.

Level Up Community connectivity

Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A collection of updates to ensure the LevelUp listserv and connections to the broader LU community are present and easy to find across the website, with a refresh of the Contribution guide.

Including IWPR Cyberwomen curricula

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Nick Sera-Leyva merged in significant resources fronm The Institute for War & Peace Reporting’s resource “Cyberwomen: Holistic Digital Security Training Curriculum for Women Human Rights Defenders” to refresh LevelUp content across the board. Nick worked with IWPR to re-structure the curriculum content into the ADIDS format for its final published version, as well as localizing it from Spanish into English.