About Us
Our Name
“Least Authority” is derived from “the principle of least authority” (PoLA) — also known in information security as “the principle of least privilege” or “the principle of minimal privilege” — a security best practice requiring system components to only have the privilege necessary to complete their intended function and not more. We further discuss PoLA in this blog post.
Our Mission
Least Authority is committed to building and supporting the development of usable technology solutions and ethical business practices to advance digital security and preserve privacy as a fundamental human right.
We uphold our mission by:
- Conducting security audits and providing consulting services for software development projects, especially within Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities. (View examples of our final reports.)
- Building products with a specific focus on increasing the security of the data and systems, along with enhancing and preserving privacy.
- Developing and contributing to free and open-source software projects.
- Collaborating with human rights organizations and non-profit foundations to provide secure tools and privacy enhancing technologies for human rights defenders. (Overview of a current Least Authority project in the human rights space.)
- Supporting additional projects, programs, and ventures that focus on increasing awareness of the importance of digital security and privacy in technology.
Our History
Least Authority was formed in the U.S. in 2011 to create freedom-compatible technologies. In 2016, the company relocated to Berlin with Liz Steininger as CEO / Managing Director. We are a small team who believe that privacy matters in Internet technology.
Meet the Team
Chris Wood
LEAD UI / UX DEVELOPER
Chris is a former academic philosopher with research and teaching interests focusing on issues relating to online privacy, censorship, and the ethics of design. A long-time Free Software advocate and hobbyist hacker, Chris is passionate about tools and technologies that empower ordinary people. He is the developer of Gridsync, a cross-platform graphical user interface for Tahoe-LAFS that aims to make secure and distributed cloud storage easy and accessible for everyone.
Florian Sesser
ENGINEERING / OPERATIONS
Florian has been programming since he was a kid and running companies since he was a teenager. When he’s not playing the guitar, reading, or hiking the Bavarian alps, he sometimes can be caught helping Least Authority with engineering.
Jessie France
PROJECT MANAGER
Jessie joined Least Authority as a project manager and focuses her efforts on supporting security consulting projects and the operations infrastructure. She has a background in project, operation, and resource management in a variety of sectors.
Lauri Hmel
FINANCE / BUSINESS OPERATIONS
Tiffany Ou
DESIGNER
Jehad Baeth
SECURITY RESEARCHER / ENGINEER
Jehad is a software engineer, an internet freedom enthusiast and an aspiring academic with a focus on information quality and data privacy and security. He has worked in a variety of companies adopting different Tech Stacks.
Dylan Lott
SECURITY RESEARCHER / ENGINEER
Dylan is a distributed systems engineer specializing in peer-to-peer networks. He previously worked at Storj building their DHT and overlay network. He works mostly in Go, JavaScript, and Python. He’s working on a database in his spare time and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Jan Winkelmann
SECURITY RESEARCHER / ENGINEER
Margherita Sgorbissa
PEOPLE / OFFICE COORDINATOR
Mirco Richter
CRYPTOGRAPHY RESEARCHER / ENGINEER
Sylvia has been writing professionally for 20 years. Her background in academic research (PhD and post-doc in Formal Linguistics, Master’s in English) is complemented by over 10 years of experience in editing, typesetting and instructional design. As a Technical Writer, Sylvia has worked on security audits, product documentation, policy and process descriptions, newsletters, blog posts, tutorials and trainings.
Rai Yang
SECURITY RESEARCHER / ENGINEER
Rai is an open source technologist, developer and researcher. Passionate about decentralized and privacy technology and its impact on democratizing social and economic systems. Rai worked on and contributed to various blockchain projects including Ethereum 2.0/1.0, Libp2p, Livepeer and other research initiatives. He also built Raven, a network privacy protocol for blockchain and p2p message broadcasting.
Allon Bar
DESIGN / USER RESEARCHER
Allon focuses on user experience, research and privacy. Prior to joining Least Authority, he was a design/user researcher with product-focused companies, and a research coordinator and human rights specialist with the Ranking Digital Rights project. In addition to having worked with the United Nations and NGOs around the world, Allon has engaged in international policymaking in U.S. Congress and at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Bjørn has been developing and running websites and online communities for the past 15 years. As a technologist, he’s been focusing both on development for web and data analytics while also venturing into graphics and security. Ihler also works to counter radicalization into violent extremism, among others in his capacity as chair of the IAC of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism and as co-founder of the Khalifa Ihler Institute.
David Braun
SECURITY RESEARCHER / ENGINEER
David grew up in Silicon Valley, has a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and has been building reliable software professionally for 30 years. Before joining Least Authority he worked at 3 different blockchain companies and is passionate about decentralized consensus and blockchain governance.
Gabrielle Hibbert
SECURITY RESEARCHER / ENGINEER
Gabrielle is a Washington DC based policy and technology consultant who fell into the rabbit hole of cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies in 2018. Her most recent work seek to analyze how regulatory bodies in the US can use zk-range proofs for self-sovereign identity. She enjoys tinkering with Smart Contracts and moving the needle further on privacy rights and advocacy in the US. Before joining Least Authority, she worked on Capitol Hill and as the research co-lead at the College of William & Mary Blockchain Lab.
Shane Farrell
COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST
Shane is a communications specialist at Least Authority. Prior to joining the team, he worked for a decade in the Middle East as a journalist, security consultant and humanitarian, and co-launched a security risk mapping software in Kenya.
Anna Kaplan
CRYPTOGRAPHY RESEARCHER
Anna’s interest lies in everything cryptographic. She studied Mathematics and Politics & Technology at the Technical University of Munich and interned at the Zcash Foundation and at IBM Research Zurich before joining Least Authority. She also enjoys to give talks about practical cryptography and zero-knowledge proof systems.
Board Members and Advisors
Zooko Wilcox
FOUNDER / BOARD MEMBER
Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn has more than 20 years of experience in secure distributed systems, free and open source software, and startups. Currently, Zooko is the Founder and CEO of the Electric Coin Company, the creators of Zcash.
Amber O'Hearn
BOARD MEMBER /
LEAST AUTHORITY ENTERPRISES MANAGER
Amber has an eclectic background with publications in several fields, including theoretical mathematics, cognitive psychology, computational linguistics, and more recently, nutrition and biology. She is an advocate of privacy-preserving and censorship-resistant technologies.