Roger Dingledine

My research on identity in dynamic networks ties together my interests in security and scalable secure systems, anonymity and privacy, cryptography and unobservability, civil liberties and human rights, and free software advocacy.

• Awards
• Publications
• Affiliations
• Projects
• Program Committees
• Degrees

Awards

Selected awards:

• 2021: Tor won The Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography.
• 2014: The Tor design paper won the Usenix Security "Test of Time" award.
• 2013: The Tor Project won the EFF Pioneer Award.
• 2012: Roger recognized by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the top 100 global thinkers.
• 2010: The Tor Project won the FSF/GNU Project Award for Social Benefit.
• 2006: Roger named by Technology Review magazine as one of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35.

Publications

Selected peer reviewed publications:

• Ryan Wails, Andrew Stange, Eliana Troper, Aylin Caliskan, Roger Dingledine, Rob Jansen, Micah Sherr. Learning to Behave: Improving Covert Channel Security with Behavior-Based Designs. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETS), July 2022. [pdf]
• Roger Dingledine, Nicholas Hopper, George Kadianakis, and Nick Mathewson. One Fast Guard for Life (or 9 months). Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETS), July 2014. [pdf]
• Tariq Elahi, Kevin Bauer, Mashael AlSabah, Roger Dingledine, Ian Goldberg. Changing of the Guards: A Framework for Understanding and Improving Entry Guard Selection in Tor. Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES '12), October 2012. [pdf]
• Rob Jansen, Kevin Bauer, Nick Hopper, Roger Dingledine. Methodically Modeling the Tor Network. Usenix Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET '12), August 2012. [pdf]
• David Fifield, Nate Hardison, Jonathan Ellithorpe, Emily Stark, Roger Dingledine, Phil Porras, Dan Boneh. Evading Censorship with Browser-Based Proxies. Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2012), July 2012. [pdf]
• Aaron Johnson, Paul Syverson, Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson. Trust-based Anonymous Communication: Adversary Models and Routing Algorithms. ACM Computer and Communications Security Conference (CCS 2011), October 2011. [pdf, slides/pptx, slides/pdf]
• Justin Samuel, Nick Mathewson, Justin Cappos, Roger Dingledine. Survivable Key Compromise in Software Update Systems. ACM Computer and Communications Security Conference (CCS 2010), October 2010. [pdf]
• Tsuen-Wan "Johnny" Ngan, Roger Dingledine, Dan S. Wallach. Building Incentives into Tor. Financial Cryptography and Data Security, January 2010. [pdf]
  Best Paper Award, FC10.
• Karsten Loesing, Steven Murdoch, Roger Dingledine. A Case Study on Measuring Statistical Data in the Tor Anonymity Network. Workshop on Ethics in Computer Security Research (WECSR 2010), January 2010. [pdf]
• Nate Evans, Roger Dingledine, Christian Grothoff. A Practical Congestion Attack on Tor Using Long Paths. Usenix Security 2009, August 2009. [pdf]
• Roger Dingledine, Andrei Serjantov, Paul Syverson. Blending different latency traffic with alpha-mixing. Privacy Enhancing Technologies workshop (PET2006), June 2006. [pdf]
• Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson. Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network Effect. Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, June 2006. [pdf, slides]
• Nick Feamster, Roger Dingledine. Jurisdictional Diversity in Anonymity Networks. Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), October 2004. [ps]
  Nominated for Best Paper Award, PET 2005.
• Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson. Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router. Usenix Security 2004, August 2004. [pdf]
  Winner of the "Test of Time" Award at Usenix Security 2014.
  Nominated for Best Paper Award, PET 2005.
• Roger Dingledine, Vitaly Shmatikov, Paul Syverson. Synchronous Batching: From Cascades to Free Routes. Privacy Enhancing Technologies workshop (PET2004), May 2004. [pdf]
• Nick Mathewson, Roger Dingledine. Practical Traffic Analysis: Extending and Resisting Statistical Disclosure. Privacy Enhancing Technologies workshop (PET2004), May 2004. [pdf]
• Nick Mathewson, Roger Dingledine. Mixminion: Strong Anonymity for Financial Cryptography. Financial Cryptography, February 2004.
• Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson. Reputation in P2P Anonymity Systems. Workshop on economics of p2p systems, June 2003. [pdf]
• George Danezis, Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson. Mixminion: Design of a Type III Anonymous Remailer Protocol. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2003. [pdf, ps]
• Alessandro Acquisti, Roger Dingledine, Paul Syverson. On the Economics of Anonymity. Financial Cryptography, January 2003. [ps, pdf]
  Nominated for Best Paper Award, PET 2003.
• Andrei Serjantov, Roger Dingledine, Paul Syverson. From a Trickle to a Flood: Active Attacks on Several Mix Types. Information Hiding, October 2002. [ps, pdf]
• Roger Dingledine, Paul Syverson. Reliable MIX Cascade Networks through Reputation. Financial Cryptography, March 2002. [ps, pdf]
• Roger Dingledine, Michael J. Freedman, David Hopwood, David Molnar. A Reputation System to Increase MIX-net Reliability. Information Hiding Workshop, March 2001. [ps, pdf]
• Roger Dingledine, Michael J. Freedman, David Molnar. The Free Haven Project: Distributed Anonymous Storage Service. Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability. LNCS 2009. Berkeley, July 2000. [ps]

Book chapters, manuscripts, and Thesis:

• Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson. "Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network Effect." In Security and Usability, an O'Reilly Media book, August 2005. [pdf]
• Roger Dingledine, Michael J. Freedman, David Molnar. "Accountability Measures for Peer-to-Peer Systems." In Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, an O'Reilly book. Nov 2000. [html]
• Roger Dingledine, Michael J. Freedman, David Molnar. "Free Haven." In Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, an O'Reilly book. Nov 2000. [html]
• Roger Dingledine. The Free Haven Project: Design and Deployment of an Anonymous Secure Data Haven, MIT M.Eng. Thesis under supervision of Ronald Rivest, June 2000. [ps, pdf]

Affiliations

• Co-founder, The Tor Project. We're a real 501(c)(3) nonprofit now! I was the president, the research director, on the board, etc, and now I am working more on community and outreach. Learn more about Tor.
• Visiting Scholar, New York University. We moved to NYC in 2019.
• Previous employment: Security Philosopher, Reputation Technologies. Reputation Technologies, Inc was a startup using reputation systems (performance tracking and prediction) to make e-commerce between businesses easier. In particular, I researched how to integrate reputation systems into peer-to-peer and other pseudonymous dynamic systems to provide security and accountability.
• Other previous employers include the MIT network security team, a summer internship at the National Security Agency, a developer for a graphics supercomputer startup called Integrated Computing Engines (ICE), and a summer working for Emory University.

Projects

• Project leaderPresident and Research DirectorCo-Founder, Tor. Tor is the second-generation Onion Routing system: it provides a TCP-based anonymizing overlay network. Tor addresses many limitations in the original Onion Routing design, and is released unencumbered as free software.
• Mixminion. The Mixminion Project is designing and building a message-based anonymous remailer protocol to replace the old Mixmaster network. Mixminion provides secure single-use reply blocks (Mixmaster provides no support for replies, instead relying on the older and less secure Cypherpunk remailers), and introduces nymservers that allow users to maintain long-term pseudonyms using single-use reply blocks.
• Project leader, Free Haven. The Free Haven Project aims to deploy a system for distributed, anonymous, persistent data storage which is robust against attempts by powerful adversaries to find and destroy any stored data. We emphasize anonymity (publisher, reader, server), accountability (reputation and micropayment schemes), persistence (publisher-specified document lifetimes), and flexibility (peers can dynamically join or leave). I've also been working on an anonymity bibliography.
• Project leader, SEUL. The Simple End-User Linux (SEUL) Project is a large organization trying to guide many other groups in making Linux better for the end-user. The end goal of SEUL is to have a comprehensive suite of high-quality applications (productivity applications as well as leisure/programming applications) available under the GPL for the Linux platform, as well as a broader base of educated users around the world who understand why free software is better.

Program Committees

• Program committee: USENIX Security 2025, Seattle WA, August 2025.
• Program committee: 25th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Washington DC, July 2025.
• Program committee: 23rd Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Lausanne Switzerland, July 2023.
• Program committee: 22nd Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Sydney Australia, July 2022.
• Program committee: Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '21), The Internet, August 2021.
• Program committee: USENIX Security 2021, The Internet, August 2021.
• Program committee: 21st Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, The Internet, July 12-16, 2021.
• Program committee: USENIX Security 2019, Santa Clara CA, August 14-16, 2019.
• Program committee: USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '19), Santa Clara CA, August 13, 2019.
• Program committee: USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '18), Baltimore MD, August 14, 2018.
• Program committee: 18th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Barcelona, Spain, July 24-27, 2018.
• Program committee: USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '17), Vancouver BC, August 14, 2017.
• Program committee: 17th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Minneapolis, MN, July 18-21, 2017.
• Program committee: USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '16), Austin TX, August 8, 2016.
• Program committee: 16th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Darmstadt, Germany, July 19-22, 2016.
• Program committee: USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '15), Washington DC, August 10, 2015.
• Program committee: Usenix Security 2014, San Diego, CA, August 20-22, 2014.
• Program committee: USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '14), San Diego, CA, August 18, 2014.
• Program committee: Financial Cryptography and Data Security '14 (FC14), Barbados, March 3-7, 2014.
• Program committee: USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '13), Washington, DC, August 13, 2013.
• Program committee: 13th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Bloomington, Indiana, July 10-12, 2013.
• Program chair: USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '12), Bellevue, WA, August 6, 2012.
• Program committee: 12th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Vigo, Spain, July 11-13, 2012.
• Program committee: Workshop on Ethics in Computer Security Research, St Lucia, March 2, 2012.
• Program committee: 2011 ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS), Chicago, IL, October 17-21, 2011.
• Program committee: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2011). Chicago, IL, October 17, 2011.
• Program committee: 16th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'11), Leuven, Belgium, September 12-14, 2011.
• Program committee: USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '11), San Francisco, CA, August 8, 2011.
• Program committee: 11th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Waterloo, Canada, July 27-29, 2011.
• Program committee: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2011, Oakland, CA, May 22-25, 2011.
• Program committee: Workshop on Ethics in Computer Security Research, St Lucia, March 4, 2011.
• Program committee: Financial Cryptography and Data Security '11 (FC11), St Lucia, February 28-March 4, 2011.
• Program committee: 2010 ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS), Chicago, IL, October 4-8, 2010.
• Program committee: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2010). Chicago, IL, October 4, 2010.
• Program committee: Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), Redmond, WA, July 14-16, 2010.
• Program committee: The 9th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS10), San Jose, CA, April 27, 2010.
• Program committee: "Privacy on the Web" track at ACM Conference SAC 2010, Sierra, Switzerland, March 22-26, 2010.
• Program committee: Workshop on Ethics in Computer Security Research, Tenerife, Spain, January 28, 2010.
• Program committee: Financial Cryptography and Data Security '10 (FC10), Tenerife, Spain, January 25-28, 2010.
• Program committee: 2009 ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop (CCSW), Chicago, IL, November 13, 2009.
• Program committee: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2009). Chicago, IL, November 9, 2009.
• Program committee: 14th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'09), Saint Malo, France, September 21-25, 2009.
• Program committee: 9th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Seattle, WA, August 5-7, 2009.
• Program committee: Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), Mountain View, CA, July 15-17, 2009.
• Program chair: Financial Cryptography and Data Security '09 (FC09), Barbados, Feb 23-26, 2009.
• Program committee: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2008). Alexandria, VA, October 27, 2008.
• Program committee: Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), Pittsburgh, PA, July 23-25, 2008.
• Program committee: 8th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Leuven, Belgium, July 23-25, 2008.
• Program committee: 2007 ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS), Alexandria, VA, October 29-November 2, 2007.
• Program committee: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2007). Alexandria, VA, October 29, 2007.
• Program committee: 7th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Ottawa, Canada, June 20-22, 2007.
• Program committee: 2007 ACM Symposium on InformAtion, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS'07), Singapore, March 20-22, 2007.
• Program committee: Financial Cryptography and Data Security '07, Trinidad/Tobago, February 12-15, 2007.
• Program committee: The Second International Workshop on Dependable and Sustainable Peer-to-Peer Systems (DAS-P2P 2007), Hiroshima, Japan, January 15-19, 2007.
• Program chair: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2006). Alexandria, VA, October 30, 2006.
• Program committee: 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 2006). Cambridge, England, June 28-30, 2006.
• Program committee: The First International Workshop on Dependable and Sustainable Peer-to-Peer Systems (DAS-P2P 2006). Vienna, Austria, April 20-22, 2006.
• Program committee: The First International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (AReS 2006). Vienna, Austria, April 20-22, 2006.
• Program chair: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2005). Alexandria, VA, November 7, 2005.
• Program committee: 5th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 2005). Dubrovnik, Croatia, May 30-June 1, 2005.
• Program committee: Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC05). Roseau, Dominica, February 28-March 3, 2005.
• Program committee: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2004). Washington, DC, October 28, 2004.
• Program committee: 2nd Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems. Cambridge, MA, June 4-5, 2004.
• Program committee: 4th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 2004). Toronto, Canada, May 26-28, 2004.
• Program committee: Security and Privacy track, Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2004). New York City, May 17-22, 2004.
• Program committee: Financial Cryptography (FC04). Key West, FL, February 9-12, 2004.
• Program committee: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2003). Washington, DC, October 30, 2003.
• Program committee: Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems. Berkeley, CA, June 5-6, 2003.
• Program committee: Security and Privacy track, Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2003). Budapest, Hungary, May 20-24, 2003.
• Program chair: 3rd Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 2003). Dresden, Germany, March 26-28, 2003.
• Program committee: CodeCon 2003. San Francisco, CA, February, 2003.
• Program committee: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2002). Washington, DC, November 21, 2002.
• Program chair: 2nd Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 2002). San Francisco, CA, April 14-15, 2002.
• Program committee: The 1st International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS02). MIT Faculty Club, Cambridge, MA, March 7-8, 2002.

Degrees