Founder

Trey Darley founded Proper Tools after three decades working at the boundary where engineering stops and governance begins — building national cybersecurity infrastructure, co-writing international standards, and repeatedly watching good technical work fail because no one had made it legible to the people who needed to act on it.

This practice exists because that gap is real, it has consequences, and closing it requires someone who can work both sides of it.

Background

Trey is Texas-born, dual Belgian-US, based in Brussels.

Trey was part of the founding team at Belgium's Centre for Cybersecurity (CCB), where he architected and implemented the Belgian Anti-Phishing Shield (BAPS), which later served as the model for the EU's DNS4EU DNS shield. Before that: embedded systems engineering for telco-grade infrastructure, threat intelligence platform development for FS-ISAC communities and across the foundational work on the US AIS sharing platform, Security Senior Manager at Accenture, and elected member of the FIRST Board of Directors.

Trey worked in film and media before moving to cybersecurity — IT director for a film-industry advertising and publicity company in the US, CTO for a Prague-based EU media-monitoring company, and IT on a $225 million Hollywood production (The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian). This pre-cyber background informs his analytical position on how technical work becomes legible to non-technical audiences and how complex production environments coordinate across institutional registers.

On the standards side: co-chair of the FIRST Time Security SIG; co-founder of the FIRST Standards SIG and DNS Abuse SIG; former co-chair of the OASIS CTI Technical Committee (STIX/TAXII); recidivist contributor/collaborator/document editor.

The 2038-class timestamp rollover problem has been the central thread of the last decade of this work. Trey co-edits ITU-T work item XSTR.epoch, approved in draft December 2025 — the first ITU-T technical paper treating the 2038-class epoch rollover cluster as a coordinated international coordination question — and co-coordinates the Epochalypse Project, the public awareness and coordination effort built around it.

Trey is a professional facilitator trained in ICA Technologies of Participation (ToP) methods, with over a decade of practice across standards bodies, government coordination, executive working sessions, and creative production environments. Pursuing IAF Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF) designation.

Regular speaker and writer on infrastructure risk and long-horizon failure modes. For inquiries, reach out.

Selected Publications

Beyond Planted Bugs in "Trusting Trust": The Input-Processing Frontier
IEEE Security & Privacy, January/February 2014.
Co-authored with Sergey Bratus, Michael Locasto, Meredith L. Patterson, Rebecca "bx" Shapiro, and Anna Shubina.
Download PDF →

Patron Saints

Grace Hopper, Evi Nemeth, Felix "FX" Lindner, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Dan Kaminsky, Paul Erdős, and Gilda Radner — whose Roseanne Roseannadanna gave us the working principle that it's always something; if it's not one thing, it's another.

People who did the work, told the truth, built things that lasted, and made the people around them better. The standard they set is worth holding.