Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist who co-founded the Tor Project. An MIT graduate in mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering, Dingledine is also known by the pseudonym arma. he is Project Leader, Director, and Research Director at the Tor Project.
Education Dingledine graduated from MIT with Bachelor of Science degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science and Engineering in 2000. He later obtained a Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.
Career Tor Project Tor was developed by Dingledine—with Nick Mathewson and Paul Syverson—under a contract from the United States Naval Research Laboratory. the software they developed was being distributed using proceeds from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, by the Tor Project. As described at the end of 2015,
as well as developing and maintaining other software tools and applications.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.
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’s protocols for anonymous email, the Free Haven Project distributed anonymous storage service, various attacks and vulnerabilities related to anonymity technologies, and the economics and network effects 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 (2014), the NSA (2007), and periodic interviews.
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. 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 Paul Syverson, 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, 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).
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