The Center for Digital Resilience is a nonprofit organization that aims to strengthen civil society’s resilience to digital threats. We see security as a collective community endeavour rather than solely an individual or organisational one. We work with regional and thematic communities of Civil Society Organisations to improve their collective understanding of the threats they face and how to mitigate them. If and when those threats materialise we provide digital security expertise through our network to facilitate fast, effective responses.
CDR Link is a privacy- and security-focused helpdesk built on the Zammad ticketing platform. It features custom messaging plugins for Signal and WhatsApp, enabling responders to safely and efficiently help communities seeking assistance. For more information, see our About CDR Link page.
CDR Link was developed primarily for digital security support organizations and collectives who are providing support to human rights defenders, activists, journalists, and other civil society groups. It has been primarily adopted as a privacy- and security-focused helpdesk, but has also been used by groups who are collecting and sharing information related to threat intelligence, human rights abuses, disinformation, and other monitoring efforts.
For more on who might benefit from adopting CDR Link, please see our Use Cases documentation, as well as this blog post from November 2019.
We built CDR Link to provide a helpdesk option that offers more privacy and security protections than existing platforms. Whether those protections are sufficient to protect you and your data will depend on your needs, context, and situation. We are building additional resources that will provide more information about CDR Link’s security features and threat model. In the meantime, you can access a recent security audit here. For resources on building a comprehensive threat model to identify and map your own needs, we recommend SAFETAG.
Yes, CDR Link is an open source project. You can access the CDR Link source code on our GitLab page. Feel free to contribute to the code or create tickets for bugs and issues on our Gitlab page.
There are two hosting options for CDR Link instances: self-hosted, and CDR-hosted.
In a self-hosted instance, you set up, maintain, and manage your own CDR Link instance. You also get to decide where the data are stored, whether on servers that only you have access to, or by choosing a hosting service that you trust.
In a CDR-hosted instance, we will manage your instance, including the hosting responsibilities. We host instances using Greenhost, an organization that is long-trusted in the internet freedom space for its commitment to privacy and security, and its record of reliability.
Users retain all rights to ownership of their data, even when it is hosted on a CDR-maintained server. To read more about data ownership, please see the CDR Link Privacy Policy.
CDR Link offers several options for Channels, which are different ways people can ask for help. Using one of these “channels” will create a ticket in CDR Link. This makes it easy to ask for help and seamless for those responding. Available channels include:
You can also create new tickets from within CDR Link for cases where you receive a request outside of these channels, like by phone or in person. You can read more at our Channels documentation page.
Not necessarily. CDR Link includes the robust permissioning features built into Zammad.Through various settings, including user roles and groups, you can define access levels for each user, including whether they can create new tickets, which existing tickets they can access, and whether they can modify those tickets or only view. For more information on user roles, permissions, and groups, see our User Guide.
CDR Link supports all of the languages that are already supported by Zammad. Those are:
CDR Link is free/libre open source software. You are welcome to visit our GitLab page and download the source code to build your own CDR Link instance at no cost.
If you would like CDR to host your CDR Link instance, or would like help setting up, customizing, maintaining, or managing your instance, please email us at [email protected] to discuss specific cost estimates.
For a free demo of CDR Link, please contact us via email at [email protected], or via Signal at +1-504-612-1168. See our Demo Instructions page for more details.