Colin Percival

Colin A. Percival (born 1980) is a Canadian computer scientist and computer security researcher. He completed his undergraduate education at Simon Fraser University and a doctorate at the University of Oxford. While at university he joined the FreeBSD project, and achieved some notoriety for discovering a security weakness in Intel's hyper-threading technology. Besides his work in delta compression and the introduction of memory-hard functions, he is also known for developing the Tarsnap online backup service, which became his full-time job.

In November 2023, he became FreeBSD's engineering lead.

Education Percival began taking mathematics courses at Simon Fraser University (SFU) at age 13, as a student at Burnaby Central Secondary School. It describes further improvements to the compression of bsdiff. After two years in development, Tarsnap entered a public beta in November 2008, and was profitable by February 2009. In 2008 he released the client for Tarsnap, his encrypted online backup service. He had already been trying for some two years to get FreeBSD running on the Amazon EC2 platform, and he increased these efforts. Building disk images himself, debugging kernel crashes, and coordinating with people at both Amazon and FreeBSD, he eventually overcame the technical obstacles, and Amazon announced official support for FreeBSD on EC2 in November 2012. He was promoted to FreeBSD's Lead Release Engineer on November 17, 2023.