Leonard Harris Sassaman (April 9, 1980 – July 3, 2011) was an American technologist, information privacy advocate, and the maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and operator of the randseedremailer. Much of his career gravitated towards cryptography and protocol development.
Early life and education
Sassaman graduated from The Hill School in 1998. By 18, he was on the Internet Engineering Task Force responsible for the TCP/IP protocol underlying the internet. It is speculated that he may have been the anonymous creator of the Bitcoin network. He was diagnosed with depression as a teenager.[1] In 1999, Len moved to the Bay Area, quickly became a regular in the cypherpunk community and moved in with Bram Cohen.
Len slips a blue cable-tie ring on 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.[3] The couple worked together on several research collaborations, including a critique of privacy flaws in the OLPCBitfrost security platform,[4] and a proposal of formal methods of analysis of computer insecurity in February 2011.[5]
Meredith Patterson's current[when?] 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.[citation needed]
In 2009, Dan Kaminsky presented joint work with Sassaman and Patterson at Black Hat in Las Vegas, showing multiple methods for attacking the X.509certificate 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.[6][7]
Sassaman was reported dead on July 3rd 2011.[9][10] Patterson stated on the same day after speaking to Belgian police that her husband's death was "unambiguously suicide".[11][12] After he had stopped responding to instant messages from Patterson while she was in the United States, she asked a friend to fly to Belgium to check up on him and the friend "found him hanging in the closet".[13][a] He was laid to rest on July 9th 2011 at De Jacht Cemetery at Heverlee in Leuven, Belgium.[16]
An ASCII art tribute by Dan Kaminsky in honor of Len, to be permanently embedded into Bitcoin's Blockchain, was first announced during "The Wake for Len Sassaman" held at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco on July 30th 2011. Kaminsky revealed it publicly during Black Hat USA 2011 at the Caesars Palace Venue in Las Vegas.[17]
^A Leuven-based "good friend" of the couple recalled learning of Sassaman's death from Patterson after returning from the nearby annual Rock Werchter music festival,[14] which ended on July 3, 2011.[15]
