Laurens Van Houtven
Principal & Co-Founder at Latacora
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
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RockstarLaurens Van Houtven is a Principal, co-founder, and security entrepreneur with 15 years of experience focused on cryptography, information security, and distributed systems from Chicago. He co-founded Latacora to help companies build pragmatic security teams and recently launched IntrusionOps for DFIR and red teaming, combining advisory leadership with hands-on operations. A prolific open-source contributor, Laurens has improved foundational cryptographic libraries (pyca/cryptography, pyopenssl) and helped make Crypto 101 more accessible through documentation and tooling. He balances deep technical work—C bindings, X.509 verification, ECDHE support—with product and company-building, including investing and founding roles across security and B2B startups. Notably, his contributions bridge low-level crypto engineering and developer-facing documentation, reflecting a rare mix of protocol-level expertise and practical developer ergonomics.
15 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Dutch, Polish, English
Github Skills (28)
static-analysis10
restructuredtext10
python10
clojure-cli10
async10
testing10
autocomplete10
rs10
c1110
amazon-web-services10
c1710
clojure10
stream10
openssl10
cryptography10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
crypto101/book
Dec 2013 - Aug 2022
Crypto 101, the introductory book on cryptography.
Role in this project:
Technical Writer & Contributor
Technical Writer & ContributorContributions:26 releases, 62 reviews, 659 commits in 8 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Laurens primarily contributed to the repository by adding and improving documentation and contributing guidelines. They added a `CHANGELOG` file to track updates and provided instructions for contributing, including style guidelines and pronoun usage. Additionally, the user corrected licensing information and improved the README with links and build instructions. The user also added a script to generate illustrations.
cryptographyprngcryptanalysiscryptointroductory
pyca/pyopenssl
Mar 2014 - Oct 2015
A Python wrapper around the OpenSSL library
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:89 commits, 3 PRs, 3 pushes in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Laurens primarily focused on improving the project's documentation and codebase quality. Their contributions involved correcting documentation errors and updating contributing guidelines to improve code readability and maintainability. The user also refactored the codebase to adhere to PEP8 standards and incorporated enhancements, such as adding ECDHE curve support. Furthermore, they updated the dependencies to require cryptography>=0.3.
cryptographypythonsslopenssl-librarypython-wrapper
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