Colin Percival
Canadian security researcher; founded Tarsnap, created scrypt; FreeBSD release engineer.
At a glance
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- Colin Percival is a Canadian computer scientist and security researcher based in Vancouver.
- He was FreeBSD's Security Officer from 2005 to 2012 and became its Lead Release Engineer in November 2023.
- He founded the Tarsnap online backup service, which became his full-time job.
- He designed scrypt, the first memory-hard key derivation function, and the bsdiff delta compression algorithm.
Key facts
- Born
- c. 19801
- Based in
- Vancouver1
- Founded
- Tarsnap, encrypted online backup (work began 2006; public beta November 2008)1
- FreeBSD
- Security Officer, August 2005 to May 2012; core team 2010 to 2012; Lead Release Engineer from 17 November 20231
- Created
- scrypt (2009); bsdiff; freebsd-update; portsnap1
- Found
- A timing side-channel in Intel's Pentium 4 hyper-threading, published May 20051
- Honours
- Putnam Fellow (1999); AWS Community Hero (2019)1
- Education
- Simon Fraser University (2001); doctorate, University of Oxford (2006)1
Roles
Founded
- TarsnapProduct
since 2006 source on Tarsnap
Links
Sources
Last checked against its sources today
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