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.
Hind Kurhan
SENIOR PROGRAM MANAGER
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
Abigail Garner
PROJECT MANAGER
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
Bryan White
SECURITY RESEARCHER / ENGINEER
Bryan has spent over a decade in software engineering / programming, while living in 4 countries across 3 continents. A maker / hacker in his spare time, Bryan likes to automate and improve every-day processes and experiences. In addition to being core contributor to storj.io / tardigrade.io, his skills include systems and network engineering. Passionate about free and open software, autonomy, and privacy, Bryan is always eager to learn new things.
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.
Sylvia has been writing professionally for 18 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.
Nathan Ginnever
SECURITY RESEARCHER / ENGINEER
Nathan is a software engineer with an undergraduate in pure mathematics. He has been developing Ethereum Solidity applications for 5 years and has experience in GPU programming, writing blockchain mining software, conjecturing on layer 2 scalability theory, and hacking on distributed file systems.
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.
Aviv
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT
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.
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.