Colin Percival

Colin A. Percival (born c. 1980) is a Canadian computer scientist and computer security researcher. He completed his undergraduate education at Simon Fraser University and a doctorate at the University of Oxford. While at university he joined the FreeBSD project, and achieved some notoriety for discovering a security weakness in Intel's hyper-threading technology. Besides his work in delta compression and the introduction of memory-hard functions, he is also known for developing the Tarsnap online backup service, which became his full-time job.