Alec Muffett

Alec David Edward Muffett (born 22 April 1968) is an Anglo-American internet security expert and software engineer. His work includes Crack, the original password cracker for Unix, and for the CrackLib password-integrity testing library. He is active in the open-source software community.

Alec Muffett
Born
Alec David Edward Muffett

(1968-04-22) 22 April 1968
Occupation(s)Internet-security evangelist, architect, and software engineer

Career

Muffett joined Sun Microsystems in 1992, working initially as a systems administrator. He rose through the ranks to become the principal engineer for security, a position which he held until he was retrenched, with many others, in 2009[1] (shortly before Oracle acquired Sun). While at Sun he was one of the researchers who worked on the factorization of the 512 bit RSA Challenge Number; RSA-155 was successfully factorized in August 1999.[2]

In 2015, Muffett was named as one of the top six influential security thinkers by SC Magazine.[3] In October of that year he co-authored[4] RFC 7686 "The '.onion' Special-Use Domain Name", with Jacob Appelbaum.

More recently, Muffett assisted the New York Times with the creation of their own Tor onion site.[5] Following that he created a temporary Onion Wikipedia site, accessible only over Tor,[6] and assisted building further onion sites for BBC News,[7] Brave,[8] Twitter,[9] The Guardian,[10] and Reddit.[11]

References

  1. "Alec Muffett, Profile". LinkedIn. Retrieved 30 January 2020.
  2. RSA-155 is factored! Archived 2012-07-22 at the Wayback Machine, rsa.com; accessed March 23, 2017.
  3. "Top 6 influential security thinkers". SC Media. 14 December 2015.
  4. Appelbaum, J.; Muffett, A. (7 October 2015). "The ".onion" Special-Use Domain Name". doi:10.17487/RFC7686 via www.rfc-editor.org. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. Sandvik, Runa (27 October 2017). "The New York Times is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service". Medium. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  6. "Wikipedia over Tor? Alec Muffett experiments with an Onion Wikipedia site". WMUK. 27 November 2017.
  7. al-Salmi, Abdallah (30 October 2019). "Leveraging the Tor Network to circumvent blocking of BBC News content". BBC. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  8. Kero, Ben (5 October 2020). "Brave.com now has its own Tor Onion Service, providing more users with secure access to Brave". brave.com. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  9. Robertson, Adi (9 March 2022). "Twitter is launching a Tor-friendly version of its site". The Verge. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  10. Soul, Jon; Kokkini, Ioanna (6 October 2022). "How we built the Guardian's Tor Onion service". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 October 2022.
  11. "Reddit Onion Service Launch : r/redditsecurity". Reddit. 25 October 2022. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
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