Len Sassaman

Len Sassaman
Len Sassaman at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress.
Born	1980 (1980)
Died	July 3, 2011 (2011-07-04) (aged 31) Leuven, Flemish Brabant, Belgium
Cause of death	Suicide
Residence	Leuven
Occupation	Researcher, COSIC
Known for	Mixmaster, X.509 attacks
Spouse(s)	Meredith L. Patterson (Married 2006)

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

Sassaman was employed as the security architect and senior systems engineer for Anonymizer. He was a PhD candidate at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, as a researcher with the 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 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 and Thomas Heydt-Benjamin), co-author of the , and at the age of 21, was an organizer of the protests following the arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov.

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.