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.

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

Background

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). Before that: embedded systems engineering for telco-grade infrastructure, threat intelligence platform development for FS-ISAC communities, Security Senior Manager at Accenture, and elected member of the FIRST Board of Directors.

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); contributor across ITU-T, IETF, and OASIS.

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 C396, approved in draft December 2025 — the first internationally recognized coordination document on 2038-class epoch rollover events — 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. (Yes, including on-set IT for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. The room-where-smart-people-disagree-and-something-needs-to-move problem looks the same whether the room is a standards body or a film set.) 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, and Paul Erdős.

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.