James Yonan
Co-Founder & CTO at OpenVPN Technologies
Boulder, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Yonan is the co-founder and CTO of OpenVPN Technologies with over 20 years of experience designing secure communications and distributed systems. He is the original creator and a long-time maintainer of the widely used OpenVPN open-source project, contributing hands-on back-end code that addresses security vulnerabilities, TLS negotiation, compression, and DHCP edge cases. Based in Boulder, Colorado, he combines product-focused architecture for commercial VPN services with deep low-level engineering, including build automation and signing for the Windows TAP driver. James blends security-first development with practical deployment experience, having shepherded both protocol-level fixes and release pipelines. Notably, his work spans both the daemon-level cryptography and the release engineering that keeps millions of VPN endpoints reliable and up to date.
20 years of coding experience
Reed College
Github Skills (20)
tls1210
vpn10
c1110
openvpn10
tls1310
security10
c1710
mtls10
driver10
device-driver10
openssl10
build-automation10
libtls10
dhcp10
network-security10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
OpenVPN/tap-windows6
Mar 2014 - Mar 2016
Windows TAP driver (NDIS 6)
Role in this project:
Automation Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
Automation Engineer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:11 commits, 1 push, 1 comment in 2 years
Contributions summary:James focused on improving the build process and packaging of the TAP-Windows driver. Their contributions include modifications to the build script (`buildtap.py`), which automates the build, signing, and packaging of the driver. They introduced changes to generate an "include" directory and added options for OpenVPN Access Server, indicating a focus on build automation and distribution for different use cases. They also addressed a security vulnerability, further solidifying their role in the build and release process.
hyper-vwindowsndis
OpenVPN/openvpn
Oct 2011 - Mar 2016
OpenVPN is an open source VPN daemon
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:32 commits, 2 branches in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:James contributed to the OpenVPN project by implementing features and addressing vulnerabilities related to network security and VPN functionalities. Their work involved modifications to DHCP handling, specifically addressing issues with router option extraction and deletion for DHCP proxy scenarios. The user also added features such as Snappy compression support and TLS version negotiation enhancements. Furthermore, they worked on code related to port sharing and incorporated security best practices with the addition of the SSL_OP_NO_TICKET flag.
securityvpndaemonwireguardopenvpn
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