Alec Muffett

Software engineer, security expert

Alec Muffett
Born
Alec David Edward Muffett

(1968-04-22) 22 April 1968 (age 55)
Occupation(s)Internet-security evangelist, architect, and software engineer

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.

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.

External links

  • Personal blog
  • Factorization of a 512 Bit RSA Modulus
  • Crypticide I: Thirteen Years of Crack
Authority control databases: Academics Edit this at Wikidata
  • DBLP