computer science

Len Sassaman

Len Sassaman is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Len Sassaman rather than just read about it. In short: 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 randseed remailer. Much of his career gravitated towards cryptography and protocol development.

Key takeaways

Len Sassaman belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Len Sassaman to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Len Sassaman from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

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 randseed remailer. Much of his career gravitated towards cryptography and protocol development.

Early life and education Sassaman graduated in 1998 from The Hill School, Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He was diagnosed with depression as a teenager. By 18, he was on the Internet Engineering Task Force responsible for the TCP/IP protocol underlying the Internet. In 1999, Len moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, quickly became a regular in the cypherpunk community and moved in with Bram Cohen.

Career 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 Zimmermann–Sassaman key-signing protocol, 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. Sassaman and Patterson founded the startup Osogato, aiming to commercialize Patterson's Support Vector Machine-based "Query By Example" (later "OBELisQ") project. Sassaman and Patterson announced Osogato's first products, a music console application and a music analysis library, at SuperHappyDevHouse #21 in San Francisco. In 2009, Dan Kaminsky presented joint work with Sassaman and Patterson at Black Hat in Las Vegas, showing multiple methods for attacking the X.509 certificate 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. In 2021, developer Evan Hatch proposed Sassaman as a possible candidate to be Satoshi Nakamoto. Sassaman had been mentioned on bitcointalk on 15 March 2013 when a user suggested Sassaman was Satoshi. A presentation given by Kaminsky at the 2011 Black Hat Briefings revealed that a testimonial in honor of Sassaman had been permanently embedded into bitcoin's blockchain.

Death

Sassaman was reported dead on July 3, 2011. Patterson stated on the same day after speaking to Belgian police that her husband's death was "unambiguously suicide". 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". He was laid to rest on July 9, 2011, at De Jacht Cemetery at Heverlee in Leuven, Belgium. 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 30, 2011. Kaminsky revealed it publicly during Black Hat USA 2011 at the Caesars Palace venue in Las Vegas.

See also Information privacy Information security

Notes

References

External links

Sassaman's home page at the Wayback Machine (archived July 6, 2011) Sassaman's former blog at the Wayback Machine (archived April 6, 2009) Archive of Len Sassaman's homepage from July 2011

Illustrations

Len Sassaman: Len memorial on the Bitcoin blockchain — Len memorial on the Bitcoin blockchain

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Len Sassaman

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Len Sassaman claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Len Sassaman before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Len Sassaman ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Len Sassaman

In research: Len Sassaman appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Len Sassaman in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Len Sassaman is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1980 births, 2011 deaths, 2011 suicides, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Len Sassaman outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Len Sassaman in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Len Sassaman means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Len Sassaman out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Len Sassaman in simple terms?

Why does Len Sassaman matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Len Sassaman?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Len Sassaman.