Dan Ballard
Software Engineer at Open Privacy Research Society
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDan Ballard is a software engineer with 14 years of experience who blends deep systems administration expertise (20+ years running Linux/BSD servers) with cutting-edge privacy and decentralization engineering. He currently contributes to Tor Browser and serves on the board and as a developer for the Open Privacy Research Society, leading development of Cwtch, a metadata-resistant messaging platform. His background spans backend security work—enhancing tools like OnionScan to analyze onion services and extract PGP artifacts—to large-scale product delivery at Amazon and Trulioo, showing comfort from low-level networking to cloud CI/CD. Known for pragmatic cross-platform builds (Go, Rust, Dart/Flutter) and maintaining automated Docker-based pipelines, he focuses on building consent-enforcing, privacy-preserving systems that prioritize user experience. Based in Vancouver, he combines research-driven security work with hands-on operational fluency, making him effective at translating privacy goals into production-ready software.
14 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
BSc Computer Scence, BSc Computer Scence at The University of British ColumbiaAS Computer Scence, AS Computer Scence at Langara College
English
Github Skills (7)
regular-expression10
security-testing10
network-security10
go10
security-scan10
security10
openpgp9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
s-rah/onionscan
Apr 2016 - May 2016
OnionScan is a free and open source tool for investigating the Dark Web.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:7 commits, 3 PRs, 5 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Dan significantly enhanced the `OnionScan` tool by implementing features to scan and analyze dark web services. They focused on improving the HTTP scanning capabilities, adding directory listing checks, and integrating PGP key extraction. Furthermore, the user added PGP key identification and extraction. They also added functionality to extract and report on potentially security relevant information from the pages that are scanned. These contributions centered around identifying vulnerabilities and enhancing the overall security analysis of onion services.
dark-webdark
dballard/markdown-bullet-journal
May 2018 - Nov 2020
A digital bullet journal using markdown and daily migrations
Contributions:22 commits, 1 PR, 14 pushes in 2 years 6 months
journalmigrationsbulletmarkdownbullet-journal
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