David Goldschlag
More info
- Affiliation
- Naval Research Laboratory
- Known for
- Onion routing
The third name behind onion routing — the US Navy researcher who, with Michael Reed and Paul Syverson, wrapped network traffic in layer after layer of encryption.
The idea debuted in 1996 in "Hiding Routing Information", presented at the Information Hiding workshop in Cambridge. Each packet is encrypted in several shells, one per relay, and each router peels off only its own layer. No single node knows both where the traffic came from and where it is going.
The onion routing patent, granted in 2001, lists Reed, Syverson and Goldschlag. When the concept was rebuilt a few years later as Tor, it was Syverson who carried it forward, alongside Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson. Goldschlag thus belongs to that class of names found in every anonymity bibliography and almost no headlines.