Chelsea Komlo
Head Of Research at Near One
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChelsea Komlo is a cryptography and privacy researcher and engineering leader with 13 years of experience building secure, production-ready systems and protocols. As Head of Research at Near One, Chief Scientist (formerly) at the Zcash Foundation, and a researcher in Waterloo’s Cryptography, Security, and Privacy lab, she blends deep academic training (PhD/MSc level) with hands-on deployments of privacy-enhancing technologies. Her background spans applied cryptography, distributed systems, and cloud/backend engineering—evidenced by contributions to projects like Tor and HashiCorp tooling where she improved security, testing, and cloud provider integrations. She also consults for early-stage companies, bringing practical threat modeling and protocol design to product teams. Based in New York, she pairs rigorous research instincts with production-focused pragmatism, often surfacing subtle implementation risks such as nil-pointer issues and anonymity edge cases before they reach users.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Masters, Cryptography, Security, and Privacy, Masters, Cryptography, Security, and Privacy at University of Waterloo
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (18)
microsoft-azure10
c1110
c-programming10
c1710
go10
azure10
tor10
cloud-infrastructure9
error-handling8
dependency-management8
refactoring7
network6
rust5
rust-lang5
algorithm4
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
hashicorp/go-discover
Apr 2018 - May 2018
Discover nodes in cloud environments
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Cloud Engineer
Back-end Developer & Cloud EngineerContributions:11 commits, 4 PRs, 18 pushes in 7 days
Contributions summary:Chelsea primarily contributed to the project by updating dependencies and refactoring Azure-related code within the `go-discover` repository. This included upgrading the Azure SDK for Go, and refactoring code to remove unnecessary pointer dereferences and improve error handling in the azure discover provider. Furthermore, the user addressed potential nil pointer dereferences.
discovergcpnodescloudkubernetes
torproject/tor
Oct 2016 - Jan 2018
unofficial git repo -- report bugs/issues/pull requests on https://gitlab.torproject.org/ --
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:44 commits, 1 comment in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Chelsea refactored and added unit tests for directory server functionalities within the Tor project. They modified code related to determining whether directory purposes require anonymous connections, refactoring the `purpose_needs_anonymity` function and converting it to use a switch statement. Furthermore, the user moved test helpers into a new header file and improved comments. These changes likely involved improving the security and maintainability of the Tor directory service.
rustsecurityreportgitlabpull-requests
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