David Stainton
Security Researcher at Least Authority
Valencia, Valencian Community, Spain
Summary
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SeniorDavid Stainton is a cryptographic protocol engineer and founder of Katzenpost, the first fully post-quantum mixnet, with 17 years of global remote software and security experience. He specializes in anonymous communication, mixnet design, and privacy-enhancing systems, contributing to high-profile open-source projects like Tor, SecureDrop, Tahoe-LAFS and gopacket (implementing BSD BPF sniffing). Comfortable across languages—Rust, Go, Nim and Lean—he blends protocol research with pragmatic engineering, having coauthored academic work on new mixnet protocols and shipped production integrations such as WalletShield for hiding cryptocurrency transactions. He has deep operational and deployment expertise (Ansible, Docker, cloud KMS) and a strong testing and QA background from projects like Tahoe-LAFS. Based in Valencia, he frequently speaks on anonymity and is currently exploring formal program and cryptographic protocol verification—an area that extends his practical mixnet experience into rigorous proofs.
17 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
123reputation
25kreached
0answers
2questions
Github Skills (35)
system-programming10
python10
sec10
testing10
c1110
security10
c1710
go10
yaml10
ansible10
ansible-galaxy10
devops10
tor10
gopacket9
unix9
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs
Aug 2014 - Feb 2017
The Tahoe-LAFS decentralized secure filesystem.
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:1262 commits, 78 PRs, 55 comments in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on improving the testing infrastructure within the Tahoe-LAFS project. Their contributions involved modifying existing test suites, specifically related to the inotify functionality. The changes included skipping tests on Windows platforms due to compatibility issues and adding/fixing tests to improve the overall testing coverage. The user demonstrated a focus on ensuring the robustness and reliability of the filesystem through comprehensive testing practices.
filesystem
google/gopacket
Mar 2015 - Aug 2016
Provides packet processing capabilities for Go
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 PRs, 41 comments, 15 issues in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:David contributed significantly to the `gopacket` library, focusing on implementing a BSD BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) sniffer. They developed and refined the `bsdbpf` package, adding the core functionality for capturing network packets on BSD-based systems. The user also made improvements, including code cleanup, bug fixes, and integrating user-configurable options like buffer size and timeout. The overall contribution was the integration of BSD-specific packet capturing capabilities to the library.
go
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