11 Facts About Colin Percival

Colin Percival completed his undergraduate education at Simon Fraser University and a doctorate at the University of Oxford.

Colin Percival graduated from Burnaby Central and officially enrolled at SFU in 1998.

Colin Percival graduated from SFU in 2001 and was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to the University of Oxford.

In Oxford, Colin Percival set out to do research in distributed computing, building on his experience with PiHex.

Colin Percival went on to serve as the FreeBSD Security Officer, from August 2005 to May 2012.

Colin Percival had already been trying for some two years to get FreeBSD running on the Amazon EC2 platform, and he increased these efforts.

Colin Percival has continued to support FreeBSD on EC2, and in 2019 he was recognized as an AWS Community Hero for his work and enthusiasm.

In 2009 Colin Percival uncovered a fatal flaw in AWS' use of cryptographic signatures used to authenticate EC2, SimpleDB, SQS, and S3 REST APIs.

Colin Percival concluded that the key derivation functions in use were vulnerable to such an attack, and sought to make these attacks cost-prohibitive by designing an algorithm that must use an amount of memory nearly proportional to its run time.

Colin Percival defined memory-hard functions in these terms, and presented scrypt as a specific example, which he used as the key derivation function for Tarsnap.

Colin Percival has collaborated with mathematicians such as Peter Borwein and Richard P Brent, giving him an Erdos number of 3.