Len Sassaman

Len Sassaman (* 1980, † 3 July, 2011 Leuven, Belgium ) was a programmer, hacker and IT security expert. He used, among other things Mixmaster project.

Work

Sassaman was a PhD student at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium as a scientist of the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography Research Group, which also belongs Bart Preneel. He was also in close contact with David Chaum. Far beyond the academic field he was a famous Cypher Punk, cryptographer and privacy advocates.

In 2002 he founded with his former roommate Bram Cohen CodeCon (code convention ) as an inexpensive alternative to large hacker conferences such as the HOPE or DEF CON, since it then " itself was not enough money for food, let alone to go to expensive conferences ".

He also worked for Network Associates on the PGP encryption software and the open source alternative OpenPGP, GNU Privacy Guard, was a member of the Shmoo Group ( rainbow tables ) and held a regular speaker at the hacker conference DEF CON. One of his best -known discoveries, together with Dan Kaminsky and his wife Meredith are the weak points in X.509 certificates. With the well-known cryptographer Phil Zimmermann, he designed the Zimmermann- Sassaman key -signing protocol.

Private life

On 11 February 2006, he made ​​his girlfriend Meredith Patterson after their performance on the fifth CodeCon publicly proposed marriage. They also worked professionally for example on OLPC ( Bitfrost ) project together. Sassaman died on 3 July 2011. His wife confirmed that he suffered from severe depression and killed himself.