Nadim Kobeissi

Early Life and Education

Nadim Kobeissi was born on 28 September 1990 in Beirut, Lebanon. He studied at the Lebanese American University in Beirut from 2008 to 2009 before relocating to Canada, where he graduated with a degree in philosophy from Concordia University in Montreal in 2013. He pursued graduate studies in applied cryptography as a Ph.D. student at Inria in Paris from 2015 to 2018, defending his doctoral thesis in December 2018. The thesis, titled "Formal Verification for Real-World Cryptographic Protocols and Implementations," focused on the formal verification of cryptographic protocols and their implementations. In 2021, Kobeissi was naturalized as a French citizen. He is fluent in Arabic, French, and English and is based in Paris.

Career and Research

Kobeissi is the primary author of Cryptocat, an open-source encrypted web chat client that drew significant attention for making end-to-end encrypted communication accessible through a browser-based interface. The project was eventually discontinued in 2019.

From 2015 onward, Kobeissi became increasingly active in the field of formal verification for cryptographic protocols, a discipline concerned with mathematically proving the security properties of cryptographic systems. This work formed the core of his doctoral research at Inria.

In 2018 and 2019, he served as adjunct professor of computer science at New York University's Paris campus, where he taught a course on computer security.

Hacktivism and Advocacy

Kobeissi has been a prominent voice against internet censorship and surveillance. In 2010, he was an early public supporter of U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning and organized a march through Montreal in December of that year in support of WikiLeaks. He also operated a WikiLeaks mirror site and contributed commentary on the subject to various Canadian news outlets.

During 2011 and 2012, Kobeissi hosted CHOMP.FM, a weekly radio program on internet activism broadcast on Montreal's CKUT-FM. The show featured guests including representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, security researcher Bruce Schneier, and journalist Glenn Greenwald.

In 2013, Kobeissi led the Skype Open Letter initiative, which united more than forty organizations — among them the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, and the Open Technology Institute — in calling on Microsoft and Skype to publish transparency reports regarding Skype monitoring and surveillance practices. The campaign achieved its stated goal when Microsoft released its first transparency report shortly after the letter was published.

Legacy

Kobeissi's work spans both the technical and activist dimensions of digital security. Through Cryptocat, he contributed an accessible privacy tool during a period of growing public concern about online surveillance. His research into formal verification methods for cryptographic protocols reflects a sustained commitment to rigorous, mathematically grounded approaches to security. His advocacy efforts, particularly the Skype Open Letter campaign, demonstrated the capacity of coordinated civil society action to influence corporate transparency practices in the technology sector.