Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Len Sassaman is a member of the Shmoo Group, as well as a researcher at COSIC, the COmputer Security and Industrial Cryptography laboratory at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is currently pursuing his PhD in electrical engineering, advised by Bart Preneel and David Chaum. The focus of Len's past research has been privacy-preserving technologies, such as anonymity and confidentiality systems, which emphasize usability as a security parameter in privacy solutions subject to the limitations of today's communication systems. Len has over fifteen years of experience designing and deploying privacy enhancing technologies and evaluating protocol security. Len is the maintainer of the anonymous remailer software Mixmaster, a former Tor and Mixmaster server operator, and has written many papers on the topic of anonymous system design. Len has also consulted on policy issues regarding Internet privacy in today's society.

Len Sassaman also co-invented the field of language-theoretic security research, which is the topic of his talk. Prior to becoming an academic researcher, Len was an active cypherpunk and held such roles as Chief Architect at Anonymizer, Inc., Senior Security Architect at Known Safe, Inc., and a Lead Software Engineer at PGP Security, Inc. Last year at Black Hat, Len presented (with Dan Kaminsky) a series of fatal flaws in the Certificate Authority system, discovered using language-theoretic security analysis methods.

Len has spoken at many security conferences, co-founded the CodeCon and Biohack! conferences and the HotPETS workshop, and will be returning to Black Hat for his eighth talk at this conference.