Roger Dingledine

Last updated
Roger Dingledine
2013-12-27 30C3 - Roger Dingledine 2885.JPG
Dingledine in 2013
Born
Roger Dingledine

United States
Other namesarma
Occupation(s)Director and Research Director, the Tor Project
Known forCo-Founding Tor and the Tor Project
Father Raymond Dingledine

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]

Contents

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. [5]

Career

Tor Project

Tor was developed by Dingledine [6] —with Nick Mathewson and Paul Syverson [4] —under a contract from the United States Naval Research Laboratory. [1] As of 2006, the software they developed was being distributed using proceeds from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, by the Tor Project. [1] As described at the end of 2015,

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]

Dingledine at a panel discussion during DEFCON 2023 Roger Dingledine DEFCON 2023 presentation.jpg
Dingledine at a panel discussion during DEFCON 2023

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]

Dingledine in 2023 Roger Dingledine in 2023.jpg
Dingledine in 2023

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]

Further reading

Related Research Articles

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 David Chaum's mix network.

An anonymous remailer is a server that receives messages with embedded instructions on where to send them next, and that forwards them without revealing where they originally came from. There are cypherpunk anonymous remailers, mixmaster anonymous remailers, and nym servers, among others, which differ in how they work, in the policies they adopt, and in the type of attack on the anonymity of e-mail they can resist. Remailing as discussed in this article applies to e-mails intended for particular recipients, not the general public. Anonymity in the latter case is more easily addressed by using any of several methods of anonymous publication.

A pseudonymous remailer or nym server, as opposed to an anonymous remailer, is an Internet software program designed to allow people to write pseudonymous messages on Usenet newsgroups and send pseudonymous email. Unlike purely anonymous remailers, it assigns its users a user name, and it keeps a database of instructions on how to return messages to the real user. These instructions usually involve the anonymous remailer network itself, thus protecting the true identity of the user.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Onion routing</span> Technique for anonymous communication over a computer network

Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a computer network. In an onion network, messages are encapsulated in layers of encryption, analogous to the layers of an onion. The encrypted data is transmitted through a series of network nodes called "onion routers," each of which "peels" away a single layer, revealing the data's next destination. When the final layer is decrypted, the message arrives at its destination. The sender remains anonymous because each intermediary knows only the location of the immediately preceding and following nodes. While onion routing provides a high level of security and anonymity, there are methods to break the anonymity of this technique, such as timing analysis.

A darknet or dark net is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and often uses a unique customized communication protocol. Two typical darknet types are social networks, and anonymity proxy networks such as Tor via an anonymized series of connections.

The Free Haven Project was formed in 1999 by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students with the aim to develop a secure, decentralized system of data storage. The group's work led to a collaboration with the United States Naval Research Laboratory to develop Tor, funded by DARPA.

In anonymity networks, it is important to be able to measure quantitatively the guarantee that is given to the system. The degree of anonymity is a device that was proposed at the 2002 Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) conference. Two papers put forth the idea of using entropy as the basis for formally measuring anonymity: "Towards an Information Theoretic Metric for Anonymity", and "Towards Measuring Anonymity". The ideas presented are very similar with minor differences in the final definition of .

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mix network</span> Routing protocol

Mix networks are routing protocols that create hard-to-trace communications by using a chain of proxy servers known as mixes which take in messages from multiple senders, shuffle them, and send them back out in random order to the next destination. This breaks the link between the source of the request and the destination, making it harder for eavesdroppers to trace end-to-end communications. Furthermore, mixes only know the node that it immediately received the message from, and the immediate destination to send the shuffled messages to, making the network resistant to malicious mix nodes.

Garlic routing is a variant of onion routing that encrypts multiple messages together to make it more difficult for attackers to perform traffic analysis and to increase the speed of data transfer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tor (network)</span> Free and open-source anonymity network based on onion routing

Tor is a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. Built on free and open-source software and more than seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, users can have their Internet traffic routed via a random path through the network.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital privacy</span>

Digital privacy is often used in contexts that promote advocacy on behalf of individual and consumer privacy rights in e-services and is typically used in opposition to the business practices of many e-marketers, businesses, and companies to collect and use such information and data. Digital privacy, a crucial aspect of modern online interactions and services, can be defined under three sub-related categories: information privacy, communication privacy, and individual privacy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Tor Project</span> Free and open-source software project for enabling anonymous communication

The Tor Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization based in Winchester, Massachusetts. 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ricochet (software)</span> Instant messaging software

Ricochet or Ricochet IM is a free software, multi-platform, instant messaging software project originally developed by John Brooks and later adopted as the official instant messaging client project of the Invisible.im group. A goal of the Invisible.im group is to help people maintain privacy by developing a "metadata free" instant messaging client.

Riffle is an anonymity network developed by researchers at MIT and EPFL as a response to the problems of the Tor network.

The Update Framework (TUF) is a software framework designed to protect mechanisms that automatically identify and download updates to software. TUF uses a series of roles and keys to provide a means to retain security, even when some keys or servers are compromised. It does this with a stated goal of requiring minimal changes and effort from repository administrators, software developers, and end users. In this way, it protects software repositories, which are an increasingly desirable target for hackers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Danezis</span> Computer scientist

George Danezis, FBCS is a computer scientist and Professor of Security and Privacy Engineering at the Department of Computer Science, University College London where he is part of the Information Security Research Group, and a fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. He co-founded Chainspace, a sharded smart contract platform, and was Head of Research before it was acquired by Facebook. After leaving Facebook he co-founded MystenLabs and is one of the designers of the Sui Blockchain. He currently works part-time as a Professor at University College London and as Chief Scientist at MystenLabs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Syverson</span> Computer scientist and mathematician at the US Naval Research Laboratory, inventor of onion routing

Paul Syverson is a computer scientist best known for inventing onion routing, a feature of the Tor anonymity network.

Hard privacy technologies are methods of protecting data. Hard privacy technologies and soft privacy technologies both fall under the category of privacy-enhancing technologies. Hard privacy technologies allow online users to protect their privacy through different services and applications without the trust of the third-parties. The data protection goal is data minimization and reduction of the trust in third-parties and the freedom to conceal information or to communicate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Mathewson</span> American computer scientist

Nick Mathewson is an American computer scientist and co-founder of The Tor Project. He, along with Roger Dingledine, began working on onion routing shortly after they graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early 2000s. He is also known by his pseudonym nickm. 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.

The Nym mixnet is a free and open-source software designed to ensure a high level of privacy in all online communications. It is an implementation of a mix network devised by David Chaum in 1981.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 MIT Tech Rev Staff (2006). "Innovators Under 35: Roger Dingledine" (print and online). MIT Technology Review (September/October). Retrieved 2016-12-31.
  2. 1 2 "Roger Dingledine's Curriculum Vitae". freehaven.net. Retrieved 31 December 2016.
  3. ↑ "Tor Project: Core People". The Tor Project. Retrieved 2017-12-16.
  4. 1 2 3 "Tor Project: Core People". The Tor Project.
  5. ↑ "Robert Dingledine".
  6. ↑ Dingledine, Roger (2002-06-26). "Initial revision - svn:r2 - master tor-0.4.6.0-alpha-dev - debian-version-0.0.1+0.0.2pre19-1 - Roger Dingledine committed on Jun 26, 2002 - 1 parent 766a465 commit 9a928eeb1215f0d7c9b6d0bb9e4571d0a16ed79a Showing 67 changed files with 12,287 additions and 0 deletions". GitHub . Retrieved 2020-12-27.
  7. ↑ Zetter, Kim (2015-12-11). "Tor Hires a New Leader to Help It Combat the War on Privacy" (print and online). Wired. Retrieved 2016-01-04.
  8. ↑ 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.
  9. ↑ "Announcing Tor's Next Executive Director: Isabela Bagueros". The Tor Project. 2018-04-23.
  10. ↑ Dingledine, Roger; Mathewson, Nick; Syverson, Paul (2004). "Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router". Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  11. ↑ USENIX Test of Time Awards. USENIX. Retrieved 2020-12-28.
  12. ↑ Danezis, George; Dingledine, Roger; Mathewson, Nick (2003-05-11). Mixminion: Design of a type III anonymous remailer protocol (PDF). 2003 Symposium on Security and Privacy. IEEE. pp. 2–15.
  13. ↑ Dingledine, Roger; Freedman, Michael; Molnar, David (2001). Free Haven Project: Distributed anonymous storage service. Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. pp. 67–95. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.420.478 .
  14. ↑ Serjantov, Andrei; Dingledine, Roger; Syverson, Paul (2003). "From a trickle to a flood: Active attacks on several mix types" (PDF). Information Hiding. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 2578. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. pp. 36–52. doi:10.1007/3-540-36415-3_3. ISBN   978-3-540-00421-9. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 19, 2021.
  15. ↑ Evans, Nathan S; Dingledine, Roger; Grothoff, Christian (2009-08-10). A Practical Congestion Attack on Tor Using Long Paths (PDF). USENIX Security Symposium. pp. 33–50.
  16. ↑ Acquisti, Alessandro; Dingledine, Roger; Syverson, Paul (2003). On the economics of anonymity (PDF). Financial Cryptography 2003. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg. pp. 84–102.
  17. ↑ Dingledine, Roger; Mathewson, Nick (2006-06-26). Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network Effect (PDF). Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS).
  18. ↑ 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.
  19. ↑ Financial Cryptography and Data Security '10 - BEST PAPER AWARD: Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project, Tsuen-Wan Ngan, Dan Wallach. Building Incentives into Tor. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. 2010-01-25.
  20. ↑ Roger Dingledine (2014-01-14). "The Tor Project".
  21. ↑ "Talk by Roger Dingledine of Torproject.org at the NSA". Washington Post . 2013-10-04.
  22. ↑ Lamb-Hall, Malea (2020-08-03). "Roger Dingledine of Tor Project talks privacy and COVID-19 apps - A key figure at the heart of the debate around online privacy, Dingledine gives us his views on staying safe in the age of Covid".
  23. ↑ "Roger Dingledine - The Current and Future Tor Project. Updates from the Tor Project". FOSDEM 2019. 2019-02-02.
  24. ↑ "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers". Foreign Policy. 2012-11-26.
  25. ↑ Zetter, Kim (2014-07-03). "The NSA Is Targeting Users of Privacy Services, Leaked Code Shows" (print and online). Wired. Retrieved 2016-01-04.
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