Admin: Created page with "'''Leonard Harris Sassaman''' (1980 – July 3, 2011) was an advocate for privacy, and the maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and operator of the ''ra..."

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Created page with "'''Leonard Harris Sassaman''' (1980 – July 3, 2011) was an advocate for privacy, and the maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and operator of the ''ra..."

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'''Leonard Harris Sassaman''' (1980 – July 3, 2011) was an advocate for [[privacy]], and the maintainer of the [[Mixmaster anonymous remailer]] code and operator of the ''randseed'' remailer.

==Early life and education==
Sassaman graduated from [[The Hill School]] in 1998.

==Career==
Sassaman was employed as the security architect and senior systems engineer for [[Anonymizer (company)|Anonymizer]]. He was a [[Doctor of Philosophy|PhD]] candidate at the [[Katholieke Universiteit Leuven]] in Belgium, as a researcher with the [[COSIC|Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography]] (COSIC) research group, led by [[Bart Preneel]]. [[David Chaum]] and Bart Preneel were his advisors.

Sassaman was a well-known [[cypherpunk]], cryptographer and privacy advocate. He worked for [[Network Associates]] on the [[Pretty Good Privacy|PGP]] encryption software, was a member of the [[Shmoo Group]], a contributor to the [[OpenPGP]] [[IETF]] [[working group]], the [[GNU Privacy Guard]] project, and frequently appeared at technology conferences like [[DEF CON]]. Sassaman was the co-founder of [[CodeCon]] along with [[Bram Cohen]], co-founder of the HotPETS workshop (with Roger Dingledine of [[Tor (anonymity network)|Tor]] and Thomas Heydt-Benjamin), co-author of the [[Zimmermann–Sassaman key-signing protocol]], and at the age of 21, was an organizer of the protests following the arrest of Russian programmer [[Dmitry Sklyarov]].

[[File:ext_38dKJsdjh_Len Sassaman 4.jpg|left|thumb|180px|Len slips a blue cable-tie ring on [[Meredith L. Patterson|Meredith]]'s finger]]
On February 11, 2006, at the fifth CodeCon, Sassaman proposed to returning speaker and noted computer scientist [[Meredith L. Patterson]] during the Q&A after her presentation, and they were married. The couple worked together on several research collaborations, including a critique of privacy flaws in the [[OLPC]] [[Bitfrost]] security platform, and a proposal of formal methods of analysis of computer insecurity in February 2011.

Meredith Patterson's current startup, Osogato, aims to commercialize Patterson's [[Support Vector Machine]]-based "query by example" research. Sassaman and Patterson announced Osogato's first product, a downloadable music recommendation tool, at [[SuperHappyDevHouse]] 21 in San Francisco.

In 2009, [[Dan Kaminsky]] presented joint work with Sassaman and Patterson at [[Black Hat Briefings|Black Hat]] in [[Las Vegas Valley|Las Vegas]], showing multiple methods for attacking the [[X.509]] [[certificate authority]] infrastructure. Using these techniques, the team demonstrated how an attacker could obtain a certificate that clients would treat as valid for domains the attacker did not control.

==Death==
Sassaman is reported to have died on July 3, 2011. Patterson reported that her husband's death was a [[suicide]].

A presentation given by Kaminsky at the 2011 [[Black Hat Briefings]] revealed that a testimonial in honor of Sassaman had been permanently embedded into [[Bitcoin]]'s [[Bitcoin#Block chain|block chain]].

== See also ==
* [[Information privacy]]
* [[Information security]]

==Source==

[http://wikipedia.org/ http://wikipedia.org/]
[[Category:People of the industry]]

Len Sassaman - Revision history

Admin: Created page with "'''Leonard Harris Sassaman''' (1980 – July 3, 2011) was an advocate for privacy, and the maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and operator of the ''ra..."