Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist known for having co-founded
the Tor Project.[1] A student of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering,[2] Dingledine is also known by the pseudonym arma.[3] As of December 2016, he continues in a leadership role with the Tor Project, as a project Leader, Director, and Research Director.[4]
Education
Dingledine graduated from
MIT with
Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2000. Then he obtained
Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from
MIT.[5]
The Tor Project develops and maintains ... The Tor Browser system, also known as The Onion Router ... a free, open source and sophisticated privacy tool that provides anonymity for web surfing and communication
as well as developing and maintaining other software tools and applications.[7][8] As of December 2016, Dingledine continues in a leadership role with the Tor project, as a Project Leader, Director, and Research Director.[4] Isabela Bagueros acts as the Tor project's Executive Director. She took over this role in January 2019, having previously been a Project Manager at the Tor project since 2015.[9]
Publications and presentations
Dingledine has written several highly cited papers, including the Tor design paper titled Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router,[10] which won the Usenix Security "Test of Time" award.[11] Other highly cited papers include
Mixminion’s protocols for anonymous email,[12]
the
Free Haven Project distributed anonymous storage service,[13] various attacks and vulnerabilities related to anonymity technologies,[14][15] and the
economics and
network effects of technologies for anonymity.[16][17][18][19]
As an advocate for strong privacy, Dingledine is frequently invited to speak about security and privacy, including at academic conferences,[2] the
NSF (2014),[20] the
NSA (2007),[21] and periodic interviews.[22][23]
Awards and honors
Dingledine was named as one of the 2006 thirty-five Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, for his work on internet
anonymization technologies through the Tor Project.[1] The Review described the importance of the work in this way:
A dissident in China uses Web-based e-mail to contact a journalist in Canada. An intelligence agency wants to surveil a foreign website. Like every operation on the Internet, these activities leave tracks. Online anonymity measures provide a way around this problem; one of the most advanced is
Tor, or the
Onion Router. / Computer scientist Roger Dingledine developed Tor ...[1]
In 2012, Dingledine and the other two initial developers of Tor,
Nick Mathewson and
Paul Syverson, were recognized by
Foreign Policy magazine as #78 in their top 100 global thinkers.[24]
Media attention
Dingledine has drawn attention after the
leak of NSA documents by
Edward Snowden, and public disclosure of the rules guiding the operation of
XKeyscore, the NSA's collection system, given XKeyscore's targeting of Tor Project onion servers, including the one Dingledine runs at MIT, which serves a directory authority for the system, as well as being the base of operation of the
Mixminion mail service, and host to various gaming and other websites (from which the
NSA might be collecting IP addresses).[25]
^As described by the MIT Technology Review at the time of the launch of the Tor Project, its function at the time was as follows. "To disguise Internet traffic's origins, Tor plots a route through any three of more than 700 volunteer-run Onion routers around the world. It sets up a two-way link between the sender's computer and the final router in the chain; data passed between them is encrypted in three layers, and each router in the chain peels off one layer along the way. Each data packet "remembers" only the address of the last router it visited. That way, even if the data is intercepted before the final router hands it off to the recipient, it's difficult to trace back to the sender." See MIT Tech Rev Staff, 2006, op. cit.
^Acquisti, Alessandro; Dingledine, Roger; Syverson, Paul (2003).
On the economics of anonymity(PDF). Financial Cryptography 2003. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. pp. 84–102.
^Dingledine, Roger; Wallach, Dan S. (2010-01-25).
Building incentives into Tor(PDF). International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. pp. 238–256.