Nick Mathewson | |
---|---|
Born | Nick Mathewson United States |
Nationality | American |
Other names | nickm |
Occupation(s) | Chief Network Architect, Tor Project |
Known for | Co-Founding Tor and the Tor Project |
Website | wangafu.net |
Nick Mathewson is an American computer scientist and co-founder of The Tor Project. [1] [2] [3] He, along with Roger Dingledine, began working on onion routing shortly after they graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early 2000s. [4] He is also known by his pseudonym nickm. [1] Mathewson and Dingledine were the focus of increased media attention after the leak of NSA's highly classified documents by Edward Snowden, and the subsequent public disclosure of the operation of XKeyscore, which targeted one of The Tor Project's onion servers along with Mixminion remailer which are both run at MIT. [5]
Mathewson graduated from MIT in 2002, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. He later earned a Master of Engineering in Computer Science and Linguistics from MIT. [6]
Tor was developed by Mathewson, along with his two colleagues, under a contract from the United States Naval Research Laboratory. [7] [3] Mathewson is also lead developer responsible for the security, design, maintenance of the Tor protocol, along with sending out security patches. [6]
He is also the primary maintainer for libevent, an event notification library used by some prominent applications like Google Chrome, Transmission and also Tor. [8] [6]
Mathewson, along with the other two developers of the Tor Project (Roger Dingledine and Paul Syverson), were recognized in 2012, by Foreign Policy magazine as #78 in their list of the top 100 global thinkers of the year. [9]
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(help)A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, informal groups aimed to achieve privacy and security through proactive use of cryptography. Cypherpunks have been engaged in an active movement since at least the late 1980s.
Mixmaster is a Type II anonymous remailer which sends messages in fixed-size packets and reorders them, preventing anyone watching the messages go in and out of remailers from tracing them. It is an implementation of a Chaumian Mix network.
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Leonard Harris Sassaman was an American technologist, information privacy advocate, and the maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and operator of the randseed remailer. Much of his career gravitated towards cryptography and protocol development.
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The Tor Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization based in Winchester, New Hampshire. It is founded by computer scientists Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and five others. The Tor Project is primarily responsible for maintaining software for the Tor anonymity network.
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