Colin Percival

Colin A. Percival is a Canadian computer scientist and computer security researcher. He began taking mathematics courses at Simon Fraser University at age 13, ran the PiHex project from 1998 to 2000 to calculate specific bits of pi, and later studied at the University of Oxford on a Commonwealth Scholarship. While at university he joined the FreeBSD project, where his doctoral research on delta compression produced the bsdiff algorithm and the freebsd-update tool. In 2005 he published a timing-based side-channel flaw in Intel hyper-threading that let a malicious thread steal secret data from another thread on the same core. He served as the FreeBSD Security Officer from 2005 to 2012, founded the Tarsnap secure online backup service in 2006, and became FreeBSD engineering lead in November 2023. He is also known for introducing memory-hard functions.