Ryan Lester - Cofounder & CEO at Cyph

Ryan Lester

Cofounder & CEO at Cyph

Washington, District of Columbia, United States

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Ryan Lester is a security-minded founder and full-stack engineer with 13 years of experience building privacy-first products, currently leading Cyph and its WebSign offshoot as Cofounder & CEO. He combines deep cryptography and systems expertise—evidenced by 10 patents, talks at Black Hat/DEF CON, bug bounties from Google, and notable contributions to libsodium and Emscripten—with hands-on product delivery across TypeScript, Go, Angular, Node.js, and Google Cloud. At SpaceX he scaled internal QA tooling and at HackerOne he audits real-world codebases, giving him a rare blend of offensive and defensive security perspective. Ryan’s work on libsodium.js and Emscripten improved WebAssembly builds and browser/node interoperability, enabling safer crypto in web environments. He’s driven by a long-standing cypherpunk ethos dating back to early Bitcoin days and focuses on making quantum-resistant, user-friendly encryption broadly accessible.

13 years of coding experience

3 years of employment as a software developer

Mclean High School

Carnegie Mellon University

MACH37 Cyber Accelerator

Stackoverflow

Stats

2,373reputation

715kreached

9answers

35questions

Badges

google-chrome

top-5%

javascript

top-5%

google-chrome-extension

top-5%

jquery

top-5%

Github Skills (36)

javascript10

scripting10

authentication10

user-authentication10

c-programming10

c1110

c1710

script10

go10

cryptography10

build-automation10

libsodium10

sh10

emscripten10

blazor-webassembly10

Programming languages (16)

PowerShellJavaC++CSSCHaxeObjective-C++Go

Github contributions (5)

jedisct1/libsodium.js

May 2015 - Aug 2018

libsodium compiled to Webassembly and pure JavaScript, with convenient wrappers.

Role in this project:

Full-stack Developer

Contributions:18 commits, 21 PRs, 75 comments in 3 years 3 months

Contributions summary:Ryan primarily worked on enhancing the JavaScript wrappers for the libsodium library. They implemented and corrected core functionality, such as the `to_string` function for encoding and decoding data, and ensured consistency in handling different input types and edge cases. Further improvements included refactoring and integrating the combined WASM and ASM.js build processes, and also added fixes related to the iOS platform. The user's contributions focused on improving the library's usability and cross-platform compatibility.

cryptographyjavascriptwebassemblycryptopure-javascript

volatiletech/authboss

Feb 2016 - May 2016

The boss of http auth.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:9 commits, 2 PRs, 11 comments in 2 months

Contributions summary:Ryan primarily focused on refactoring and enhancing the Authboss project, a library for HTTP authentication. Their contributions included the addition of "Maker" properties to the configuration, enabling flexible instantiation of store and mailer dependencies. They also addressed App-Engine-related fixes, suggesting an understanding of deployment environments and dependency management. Furthermore, they refactored core modules (recover, confirm, register, auth) to increase robustness.

authenticationbossauthhttp-auth

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