Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist known for having co-founded

the Tor Project The Tor Project, Inc. is a Seattle-based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization founded by computer scientists Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson and five others. The Tor Project is primarily responsible for maintaining software fo ...

. A student of mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering, Dingledine is also known by the pseudonym arma. As of December 2016, he continues in a leadership role with the Tor Project, as a project Leader, Director, and Research Director. His father, Raymond Dingledine, is a professor in Emory School of Medicine.

Education

Dingledine graduated from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

with

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2000. Then he obtained

Master of Engineering A Master of Engineering (abbreviated MEng, M.E. or M.Eng.) is either an academic or professional master's degree in the field of engineering. International variations Australia In Australia, the Master of Engineering degree is a research de ...

in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from

Career

Tor Project

Tor was developed by Dingledine—with Nick Mathewson and

Paul Syverson Paul may refer to: *Paul (given name), a given name (includes a list of people with that name) * Paul (surname), a list of people People Christianity *Paul the Apostle (AD c.5–c.64/65), also known as Saul of Tarsus or Saint Paul, early Chri ...

—under a contract from the

United States Naval Research Laboratory The United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is the corporate research laboratory for the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. It was founded in 1923 and conducts basic scientific research, applied research, technological ...

. As of 2006, the software they developed was being distributed using proceeds from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, by the

Tor Project Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to conc ...

. As described at the end of 2015, as well as developing and maintaining other software tools and applications. As of December 2016, Dingledine continues in a leadership role with the Tor project, as a Project Leader, Director, and Research Director. 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.

Publications and presentations

Dingledine has written several highly cited papers, including the Tor design paper titled Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router, which won the Usenix Security "Test of Time" award. Other highly cited papers include

Mixminion Mixminion is the standard implementation of the Type III anonymous remailer protocol. Mixminion can send and receive anonymous e-mail. Mixminion uses a mix network architecture to provide strong anonymity, and prevent eavesdroppers and other att ...

’s protocols for anonymous email, the Free Haven Project distributed anonymous storage service, various attacks and vulnerabilities related to anonymity technologies, and the

economics Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes ...

and

network effects In economics, a network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products. Netw ...

of technologies for anonymity. As an advocate for strong privacy, Dingledine is frequently invited to speak about security and privacy, including at academic conferences, the

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party *National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political gr ...

(2014), the

NSA The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...

(2007), and periodic interviews.

Awards and honors

Dingledine was named as one of the 2006 thirty-five Innovators Under 35 by ''

MIT Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

'', for his work on internet

anonymization Data anonymization is a type of information sanitization whose intent is privacy protection. It is the process of removing personally identifiable information from data sets, so that the people whom the data describe remain anonymous. Overv ...

technologies through the Tor Project. The ''Review'' described the importance of the work in this way: In 2012, Dingledine and the other two initial developers of Tor, Nick Mathewson and

, were recognized by Foreign Policy magazine as #78 in their top 100 global thinkers.

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 XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intellige ...

, 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

mail service, and host to various gaming and other websites (from which the

might be collecting IP addresses).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dingledine, Roger Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni American computer scientists Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Tor (anonymity network) Free software programmers