 Sassaman was a well-known cypherpunk, cryptographer and privacy advocate.He worked for Network Associates on the PGP encryption software, was a member of the Shmoo Group, a contributor to the OpenPGP IETF working group, the GNU Privacy Guard project, and frequently appeared at technology conferences like DEF CON.Sassaman was the co-founder of CodeCon along with Bram Cohen, co-founder of the HotPETS workshop (with Roger Dingledine of Tor and Thomas Heydt-Benjamin), co-author of the Zimmermann–Sassaman key-signing protocol, and at the age of 21, was an organizer of the protests following the arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov.