Ben Adida
Executive Director at VotingWorks
Greater Boston United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Adida is an executive technology leader with 17 years of experience building secure, practical web systems and a PhD in cryptography and information security from MIT. As Executive Director of VotingWorks he leads the first vendor of open-source voting machines in the U.S., driving strategy and security-minded software architecture for auditable elections. His background spans founding open-source projects, leading engineering teams at Mozilla, Square, and Clever, and inventing verifiable web voting (Helios) during his postdoc at Harvard. Ben combines deep crypto and privacy expertise with operational product leadership, having shipped identity and authentication systems at scale (e.g., Mozilla Persona) and contributed to secure session tooling in open-source. He has a long history of standards and interoperability work (co-authoring RDFa) and board-level experience at Creative Commons, reflecting a commitment to transparent, community-driven technology. Known for turning research-grade security ideas into usable, auditable products, he blends academic rigor with pragmatic engineering.
18 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Cryptography and Information Security, PhD Cryptography and Information Security at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
3reputation
107reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (10)
javascript10
nodejs10
proxy10
cookie10
expressjs10
hmac10
encryption10
security10
testing9
react6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
mozilla/node-client-sessions
Dec 2011 - May 2013
secure sessions stored in cookies
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:59 commits in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Ben focused on building the core functionality of a cookie-session library. Their work included establishing the basic package structure and implementing key components such as proxy handlers to manage and monitor session data. They integrated encryption and HMAC to enhance the security of the session data stored in cookies, along with cookie options and maxAge support. This work involved significant modifications to the core logic, including handling key deletion and session state persistence across multiple requests.
securestoredstatelesssession-storesession-cookie
votingworks/module-usbstick
Jun 2019 - Oct 2020
Contributions:2 PRs, 2 pushes, 5 branches in 1 year 5 months
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